Report: Fake COVID Lockdown Unemployment Payments Total $60 Billion in Waste

A new report reveals yet another reason why the government’s obscene lockdown policies were a bad idea with findings that fake unemployment payments may total as much as $60 billion.

According to the Government Accountability Office, billions of dollars have been wasted in fraudulent unemployment benefits to applicants who don’t deserve it and fraudsters have stolen more than $60 billion in the people’s money.

Per the Daily Wire:

State workforce agencies, which are responsible for administering unemployment programs, have officially reported $4.3 billion of fraud between April 2020 and June 2022. Another fraud measure, cases flagged by the Labor Department as potential fraud, could imply some $45 billion in fraudulent payments between March 2020 and April 2022. Extrapolating another lower-bound estimate from the agency, which said at least 7.6% of regular unemployment insurance payments were fraudulent, would imply a conservative estimate of $60 billion.

“Current measures and estimates do not reflect the full extent of fraud, but they do provide important insights on fraud risks,” according to a post from the Government Accountability Office. “And while fraud risks increased as a result of the pandemic, some will remain long after if not addressed.”

Some $878 billion was paid across all unemployment insurance programs between April 2020 and September 2022. “The unprecedented demand for benefits and the need to implement the new programs quickly increased the risk of financial fraud,” the agency continued.

Officials in the Department of Justice have been attempting to claw back the fraudulently obtained taxpayer funds. One example cited by the report noted a former state workforce agency employee who used others’ identities to submit nearly 200 fraudulent applications; the individual was ordered to pay $4.3 million in restitution and will spend over five years in prison. In another instance, an individual used stolen identities to submit at least 300 applications across the country and will spend more than 3 years in prison after paying $1.6 million.

Naturally, Democrats have spent the last two years blocking Republican efforts to gain access to the records to discover the extent of the fraud.

Now that the GOP is in control of the House, committeemen are now getting ready to get those records at last.

Of course, the truth is that even the “proper” COVID benefits were fraud. It was all government waste from day one.

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