Unemployment Fraud Has Nothing To Do with Workers
A recent Axios article explores an estimated $400 billion lost in unemployment fraud.
When the pandemic hit the government told workers to stay home and apply for unemployment. Many states were completely unprepared for the amount of unemployment claims that poured in resulting in a complete mishandling of the situation that left workers jobless and without income.
As the immediate dangers of the pandemic are ending and states are slowly reopening it is being revealed that lots of the money meant for unemployment programs was stolen through fraudulent accounts by criminal syndicates.
400 Billion tax payer dollars lost in fraud seems like an incredible failure of our federal government but it has been workers that have faced the most scrutiny. Narratives have been pushed claiming that workers don’t want to return to work while at the same time being the ones paying taxes towards the same safety nets they expect to work when they need them.
When thinking about how this could have been prevented it really has to do with the federal decision to have people go on unemployment. With the successes of stimulus checks and their ability to quite literally pull people out of poverty it seems like an unemployment system based off IRS information that is able to directly send payments into someone’s bank account would have been a much better option for unemployed workers.
Not only would workers have benefitted from a more streamlined system, it would have completely prevented the fraud problems that are now being revealed. So, if you hear people talk about how unemployment has been negative it needs to be understood that this was a government decision that could have easily been adverted.