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Additionally, the Department of Labor’s weekly unemployment claims report does not provide an accurate estimate of the number of Americans claiming benefits during the pandemic, according to the US Government Accountability Office. This is because of backlogs in processing a historic number of claims that have swamped many state agencies, among other data issues.
The shortfall comes in the temporary pandemic unemployment assistance program that Congress created last spring to provide benefits to self-employed workers, construction workers, independent contractors and some affected by the coronavirus epidemic.
The majority of states pay recipients of this program the minimum benefit instead of the amount they are entitled to based on past earnings, GAO said. Most states decided to do this initially to get the new program up and running faster, but have not recalculated benefits based on actual earnings.
States should make up the difference with claimants, but the Department of Labor told GAO it doesn’t know how many states have started doing so. The California website said on Oct. 30 that it was recalculating payments based on individuals’ total income in 2019 and would refund the difference.
Among the 41 states that reported pandemic program data in September, average benefits paid ranged from about $ 114 to about $ 357 per week.
The Unemployment Pandemic Assistance Program has had a difficult road since its inception. He has been the target of fraud across the country.
California, for example, saw a surge in continued pandemic claims at the end of August. The state therefore temporarily stopped accepting new applications in September and implemented a new identity verification process to fight fraud. Its previous anti-fraud efforts have led to a drop of more than 72% in requests for assistance in the event of an unemployment pandemic.
The Department of Labor, state agencies and the U.S. Secret Service all investigate fraud, involving hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars.
It is not known how many people are receiving benefits
The report also highlighted problems with assessing the number of people receiving unemployment benefits during this period of historically high claims. For example, if a person submits claims for several weeks at a time, each week is counted as a separate claim – making more Americans appear to be unemployed than they are actually.
States have also been inconsistent in reporting claims from week to week. Arizona, for example, has reported nearly 2.3 million pandemic unemployment assistance claims one week and none the following week – due to suspicion of fraud.
Accurate data is important, especially as lawmakers must decide in the coming weeks whether to extend two key pandemic unemployment benefit programs they created in March to respond to the outbreak. . The Pandemic Unemployment Assistance Program and the Pandemic Emergency Unemployment Compensation Program, which provides an additional 13 weeks of benefits, both expire at the end of the year.
The GAO recommended that the Department of Labor revise its weekly press releases to clarify that the numbers it reports do not accurately estimate the number of Americans claiming benefits, as well as researching options for reporting the claims. correct data.
The ministry accepted both recommendations, but did not support retroactive reporting of more precise data.
According to the latest weekly report from the Ministry of Labor, 9.1 million people were receiving unemployment assistance benefits in the event of a pandemic and 4.5 million received extended unemployment benefits in the event of an emergency pandemic.
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