by Wolf Richter
Wolf Street
Fraudulent payments by California could exceed $20 billion. New security measures to prevent fraud cause delays in payments that triggered a new hullabaloo.
The unemployment crisis in California continues to be huge. The state is still down 1.4 million “payroll jobs,” not including work for gig workers, from December 2019. The amount the state has paid in unemployment benefits is also huge: $114 billion between March 2020 and January 16, 2021. The state processed 19.5 million claims during that time, compared to 3.8 million claims in all of 2010, the unemployment peak of the Great Recession.
To top it off, a new federal unemployment program for gig workers was thrown into the chaos with little guidance and no preparation and no instant way of verifying even the identity of the claimants – and fraud was also huge, and getting huger with each report.