Congressional panel investigating ‘the state of California’s unemployment insurance system’

California’s unemployment system, plagued by multibillion-dollar fraud schemes involving COVID-related benefits, is being investigated by the Republican-led House Oversight and Accountability Committee.

The committee plans its first hearing of the new Congress Wednesday on the federal unemployment program and the unemployment systems in California, New York and Pennsylvania. Federal law enforcement and watchdog officials are scheduled to testify.

The committee expects many more such hearings after that. Examining COVID-related spending is a top priority for Chairman James Comer, R-Ky.

“Democrats in the administration and Congress have spent far too much time pushing money out the door and far too little time conducting meaningful oversight of how that money is being spent,” Comer said.

Comer has requested a series of documents and communications about the jobless benefit program from California’s Employment Development Department, which manages the state system. No Californians are scheduled to appear Wednesday.

In recent years, EDD has strengthened its fraud detection program. As of November, EDD reported 1,713 investigations into fraud have been opened in the last three years. There have been 296 convictions and more than $1.1 billion seized or recovered so far as investigations into pandemic fraud continue.

Job losses mount

California, like many other states, found itself overwhelmed in 2020 as the pandemic caused the state’s unemployment rate to spike to historic levels.

With increased unemployment across the country, Washington created the Pandemic Unemployment Assistance program, which provided benefits to people not traditionally eligible, such as independent contractors.

EDD was flooded with requests for benefits, and quickly sent out payments.

The program was beset by massive fraud, much of it apparently engineered by prisoners and organized crime interests. The federal program lacked the traditional safeguards of the regular unemployment insurance programs in the states.

California officials estimated at least $20 billion was improperly paid, the vast majority of it in the new federal programs, and lamented it would be difficult to get most of that back.

Is Newsom to blame?

Comer is making it clear he believes California’s predicament cannot be blamed solely on federal government policies and practices.

“Governor (Gavin) Newsom and agency officials tried to deflect by blaming the federal government for expanding unemployment benefits during the pandemic and loosening eligibility rules,” Comer said in a three-page letter to Nancy Farias, director of the state’s Employment Development Department, which manages the California unemployment program.

Among the items he’s seeking are information involving efforts to prevent payment of fraudulent claims, to recoup improperly paid claims and identifying the total number of wrongly paid claims.

Comer cited a January 2021 report from then-State Auditor Elaine Howle, who found “the federal government warned the state at least three times in the early months of the pandemic to beef up its fraud protections.”

The Bee reported at the time that Howle found more than 1,700 claims were coming from a single address.

People around California had been finding since the summer of 2020 that they were receiving mailings with unknown names from EDD. The audit said that as late as December 2020 the agency was “allowing claimants to continue to collect benefits using suspicious addresses because it did not establish payment blocks for their claims.”

Comer also quoted Julie Su, then the state’s labor secretary, who said in January 2021 on an EDD conference call, “There is no sugar coating the reality, California did not have sufficient security measures in place to prevent this level of fraud.”

Su is now the U.S. deputy secretary of labor.

Who committed fraud?

The Newsom administration named McGregor Scott, the former U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of California, as special counsel to coordinate efforts to catch and prosecute those involved in the schemes. At the time, he listed five types of fraud:

▪ Transnational organized crime. Scott called this “probably the most significant,” fueled by the dark web, he said, with Social Security numbers readily available for purchase.

▪ Domestic organized crime. He suggested that “traditional street gangs have figured this out, and are getting the money, or have gotten the money, and using it to facilitate their nefarious enterprises.”

▪ Grifters. These are people who spend their lives trying to devise ways to steal from the government and various insurance programs.

▪ Miscellaneous.

▪ The incarcerated population. In one case, the U.S. attorney’s office described a case involving women who had been incarcerated at the Central California Women’s Facility in Chowchilla.

They said an inmate sent her own and several other inmates’ personal identifying information to submit the unemployment insurance claims in their names. The applications said the inmates had been working various self-employment jobs, which turned out to be false since they were in prison and therefore ineligible for benefits.

While the federal pandemic programs have ended, EDD has taken several steps to strengthen its overall fraud detection methods.

It launched an identity verification system, ID.me, and estimates it has prevented more than $125 billion in attempted fraud. EDD said its special counsel has worked with ID.me to “refer cases of fraudulent claims to law enforcement agencies.”

The agency also said it’s cooperating with vendors and data scientists to “identify potentially fraudulent claims using cutting-edge data analytics and to refer these cases to law enforcement agencies for further investigation.

And it’s working with Thomson Reuters to cross-check unemployment applications against law enforcement databases.