- The investigations cover payments made from March 2020 to April 2022 and so far more than 1,000 people have been charged for duplicate payments or payments made to dead people.
The Labor Department inspector’s office reported that more than 1,000 people were charged with fraud in unemployment aid provided during the COVID-19 pandemic in the US, after detecting that $45.6 billion in potentially fraudulent benefits were granted .
The watchdog previously attributed about $16 billion to duplicate payments or payments made to dead people, people with suspicious email accounts, or federal prisoners. However, this week the bureau updated its estimate and now says the federal government likely made $45.6 billion in payments.
“Hundreds of billions in pandemic funds attracted fraudsters looking to exploit the program, resulting in historic levels of fraud and other improper payments,” Inspector General Larry Turner said in a statement.
In the first five months since the start of the pandemic in March 2020, more than 57 million people in the United States signed up for the unemployment assistance program, a joint federal and state initiative that constitutes the first line of action against the impact of lack of employment.
According to the statement, the injection of billions of dollars that this program received from federal funds in the midst of the pandemic gave individuals and organized criminal groups a high-level target.
The investigations cover payments made from March 2020 through April 2022 and included $3.1 trillion that President Donald J. Trump approved in 2020, followed by a $1.9 trillion package that President Biden signed into law in 2021.
Since the start of the pandemic, US authorities have opened more than 190,000 investigations into potential aid fraud, a figure more than 1,000 times the usual volume.
Of the 1,000 people who have already been charged with fraud, “more than 400” have been sentenced to date, the statement added, according to which those sentences add up to more than 7,000 months in prison in total.
There was so much unemployment fraud that even after two years of work, federal investigators are just beginning to deal with it. Authorities have said the fraud is so far-reaching that some small-dollar thefts will never be prosecuted.