I'm well aware of the common cognitive dissonance whereby a system which you are not familiar with seems like it should be <i>trivial</i>. But I'm having a hard time understanding where the complexity of these systems actually lie.<p>State and Federal employment records already exist with your social security number, address, employer address, employer ID number, and amount of taxes that have been withheld. I can retrieve my own copy of this record online from the IRS and my own state relatively easily.<p>Someone should not be able to [automatically] claim unemployment benefits for past income on which taxes have not been withheld, or estimated taxes have not been paid. That seems trivially fair. Even people making minimum wage will have payroll taxes withheld. Calculating an upper limit on the amount that can be processed automatically should therefore be trivial.<p>Next is the question of where to send the payment. DMVs cover a large percentage of the population. Beyond the DMV, there's voter registration, credit reports, address of record for where the last tax refund was sent, utility bills, phone records.<p>When I had a larger than typical refund last year, my state sent me a letter asking for copies of my and my wife's social security cards, passports, and utility bills before they would issue the refund. I felt that was pretty burdensome considering I was requesting the refund to the same exact bank account number which I had been paying them from for the last 5 years.<p>It's obvious the state is just totally incapable of running even the simplest of validation rules. It's just helicopter money dropping from the sky, and they don't really care who gets it, because it's not their money. It's not like anyone is going to lose their job or not get re-elected because of it.<p>The fact that's it's so easy to funnel all this money <i>out of the country</i> is a pretty wild indictment of FinCEN and the like.
The unemployment schemes in Colorado and California have been a total disaster. I received a unemployment debit card in the mail - as well as a claim number. Called the state, filed a FTC report, and called the bank. None of them really cared or did anything about it.<p>In California - the scale of the graft was so bad that they have had to pause the program multiple times.<p><a href="https://abc7.com/unemployment-california-edd-backlog-ca-where-are-my-benefits-usa/6469259/" rel="nofollow">https://abc7.com/unemployment-california-edd-backlog-ca-wher...</a><p>Is it too much to ask for a government that both governs and is actually competent?
I feel like this article is very suspicious.<p>nowhere is a source linked or cited other than a federal official for 36 billion during the month of november<p>nowhere on <a href="https://www.hudoig.gov" rel="nofollow">https://www.hudoig.gov</a> (the OIG official site) can I find this report.<p>36 billion is an almost comical number without some sort of meaningful supporting evidence. I think it warrants serious consideration if this HN article should be flagged or not.
US aid to Nigeria is 793M<p><a href="https://explorer.usaid.gov/cd/NGA" rel="nofollow">https://explorer.usaid.gov/cd/NGA</a><p>Perhaps this should be conditioned on punishing these criminals or just suspended for the next few years
It's so stupid that they mail recipients for legal liability <i>after</i> the crime, but couldn't mail them and notify that unemployment is beggining before payments are made.<p>step 1) Verify the unemployed mailing address is the same as on the bank account you are sending to. If it is not the same for legitimate reasons,<p>step 2) Mail a pin code to the local address.
step 3) Collecting unemployment requires entering that pin.<p>I'm sure there are some edge cases to work out, but this isn't rocket science.
And meanwhile my unemployment payments sit at 0 nearly four months after filing. Just sitting at pending a determination. Can't get anyone to answer the phone or e-mail.
In Washington state, the unemployment agency has been hindering investigations to the point that a public warning has been issued to the agency's leaders about it from the investigators (<a href="https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/politics/washington-auditor-warns-unemployment-agency-on-interference-with-audits-into-massive-fraud/" rel="nofollow">https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/politics/washingto...</a>). The head of this agency recently claimed that $357M of $600M has been recovered. However, it is hard to trust this figure because the agency has already been called out for misstating financial impact (<a href="https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/times-watchdog/state-auditor-weak-security-accounting-errors-in-600-million-unemployment-fraud/" rel="nofollow">https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/times-watchdog/sta...</a>).<p>What's really damning is the level of incompetence. Washington state's unemployment agency went an entire year without standard anti-fraud checks, leaving them broken that entire time. They only fixed it this year, seemingly because this unprecedented level of fraud caught the public's attention. The agency's leader, Suzi LeVine, was picked by Governor Jay Inslee to lead this agency as a "natural fit". But the reality is that it was a nepotistic appointment - LeVine was a Sales and Marketing executive at Expedia and then US ambassador to Switzerland. Her early career work experience at Microsoft was more technical but it was too long ago and too limited to give her "tech credentials". However, she was a prominent DNC fundraiser and donated significantly to Inslee's campaigns (<a href="https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/politics/how-democratic-party-fundraiser-and-former-ambassador-suzi-levine-came-to-run-embattled-state-unemployment-system/" rel="nofollow">https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/politics/how-democ...</a>), so here we are.
It is hard from the article to see where they pull the $36b headline number from...<p>“California officials drew headlines recently for announcing they suspect as much as $2 billion was paid out in improper payments. Other states have reported lower losses: $242 million in Massachusetts, $200 million in Michigan, $18 million in Rhode Island, $8 million in Arizona and $6 million in Wisconsin.”<p>California is about 15% of US GDP, so even if many other states were hit much worse, getting to $36b is hard.
This seems to be indicative of the great problem of the future. If a small percentage of the world’s population are devious and seek to ruin things for everyone else, how does the global society punish that? If it’s only just 1% of the population, that’s still over 70 million folks spread across thousands of jurisdictions... The ultimate free rider problem. And will likely grow exponentially until we come up with some way to change the structure of the world, or if the fraction grows, until they consume all the productive surplus.
"Eventually, the [Washington] state’s computers started to flag anomalies: out-of-state banks, duplicate email addresses and multiple names using the same bank accounts. But there and elsewhere, <i>antiquated state computer systems</i> failed to flag foreign IP addresses, repeated computer serial numbers and techniques to mask that number."<p>The current version of WA employment security dept software was deployed in 2017. It was a boondoggle that cost taxpayers ~$50mm.<p>edit-to-add-link:
<a href="https://www.king5.com/article/news/investigations/years-late-and-millions-over-budget-state-computer-system-called-a-failure/281-346039336" rel="nofollow">https://www.king5.com/article/news/investigations/years-late...</a>
Many (many) years ago, in Illinois, in order to collect unemployment, I had to visit a state employment office and meet a state employee and explain the circumstances around how I'd become involuntarily unemployed. No big deal, the checks came.<p>So I wonder: would the additional cost of employing humans to vet unemployment claims face to face cost less than the corruption of an automated system?
This is why <i></i>universal<i></i> programs are better. If you have gatekeepers you incentivize corruption. If you have tests you incentivize cheating. There's just too many knobs and dials (programs).<p>Something like UBI is much simpler and therefor has far fewer attack vectors. The only test is to verify citizenship. A process to handle claims of non-receipt would be easy if a cheque can be expired and a new one sent.<p>Who cares if wealthy citizens also get a pittance (to them)? It's more fair that they do anyway! Expire the cheques after like a year, so people can simply opt out by not cashing them before they expire.
> Eventually, the state’s computers started to flag anomalies: out-of-state banks, duplicate email addresses and multiple names using the same bank accounts.<p>There are also entire markets of compromised remote protocol computers, sorted by location and bandwidth, payable in cryptocurrency.<p>This allows you normal, dynamic residential and office IP addresses that even flagging VPNs will allow people to get around.<p>It is likely these are used as well, and gives state agencies a false sense of security. I don't consider those organizations having any solution.
I worked for a big tech company in the Seattle area when the pandemic started. I had previously received notifications of my PII being misappropriated in attacks against my company's medical insurance administrator, as did all of my co-workers.<p>The Washington State unemployment web site only required that you type in the right PII when registering, which pretty much was just your name and SSN. Maybe the address would need to match too, but regardless it was all the stuff that would have been available to any breach such as the ones that hit Equifax or Anthem.<p>Several weeks into the pandemic I got a letter in the mail from the Washington State Employment Security Department (ESD) referencing a claim number and giving me advice on how to start up a tech business or something. I was like, "Um, why is there a claim number on this letter?" I went to the ESD website and tried to register with my SSN, only to be greeted with something like, "Sorry, looks like you're already registered with email address <i></i><i></i>*pwned1337@gmail.com."<p>I knew right away what was going on, and I alerted my co-workers that they should go check out to see if their SSN was associated with some random email address they didn't recognize. Sure enough, about a dozen others in Washington state reported that they were hit too.<p>From those who weren't popped, we learned that just by providing your name and SSN, the web set would spill out your income to whoever's using it and then let them register for unemployment benefits in your name to whatever random bank account you want to link. The fraudsters probably just went through their Equifax or Anthem dumps and selected the higher-income ones in the tech industry.<p>A few weeks later my HR department reached out to me with, "Hi, we got a notification that you're collecting unemployment benefits. You're not planning on leaving the company are you?" To which I replied (in more civil terms), "No, you dipstick, it's the same thing that's happening with the dozens of other employees in Washington state right now, of which I'm sure you're aware. Why aren't you mentioning anything about the massive amount of identity fraud going on with your Washington state employees?" It was radio silence from HR from that point on.<p>I tried calling the ESD fraud hotline, but it was so overwhelmed that it wouldn't even let me get in a queue. It just said, "We're too busy, bye bye" and hung up. I figured the system would work it all out eventually, and about a month ago I got a letter informing me that their investigation into the fraud was completed and that everything was cleared up.<p>An article on this:<p><a href="https://www.king5.com/article/news/local/employment-security-department-unemployment-fraud-audit/281-7f82d90a-abec-4bd4-89cf-f130d0b12ed5" rel="nofollow">https://www.king5.com/article/news/local/employment-security...</a>
Much of it is assuredly going to organized crime, just as always when a lot of government money is moving around at once. The similarities between the bad loans bailed out during the Savings and Loan Crisis and the Financial Crisis have convinced me of that.
Maybe the answer is a push model vs pull model for money? Cryptographically secure money has its own new set of problems, but at least someone can't "pull" any amount of money from you with nothing but an account number.
The real story is we could have trivially stopped this fraud by issuing 2FA tokens to every American less than the cost of this fraud.<p>We could also have required debit cards in place of direct payments to random banks be sent to the address on file with the IRS for the majority with correct info on file and handled the minority of exceptions by in person appointments at a government office including for example post offices where you would show government issued photo ID to receive your debit card.
The (very reasonable) comment this reply was originally threaded with is now dead, so I’ll post it here:<p>Some level of fraud in a social welfare system is absolutely acceptable, if tightening controls to eliminate the fraud would mean that otherwise eligible people didn’t receive benefits they qualified for, or even if it meant that accessing those benefits became much more onerous. I don’t doubt that $36bn is too high, but this kind of analysis is almost never present in these articles and politically in this country the spectre of fraud is usually used as an anti-welfare cudgel
36B (in a year) is about $120 per citizen (assuming 300M population). = $10/mo<p>But also, some of the monies have been recovered<p>Also, my health plan costs $1000/mo.<p>Headline feels targeted to me. Like equivocation of unemployment to scams
And why excactly, all the world has to send information about every international transaction to the USA?<p>No wonder they have no money for a new computer and controll system, if they are working like this.
There are many factors involved, but at a basic level there is no robust record of identity and the federal or state level. Arguably both federal and state governments should have a detailed record of who paid what taxes. Such a record could make this kind of fraud much more difficult. This might even be a context in which blockchains have some utility.
I literally do not care. The US spent almost 700 billion dollars on defense last year. If we're worried about how much the US costs, let's start there.
In 2020 your government has no way to identify you.<p>It's shocking and absurd and affects everything.<p>Beyond the operational stupidity ... <i>they don't even know better</i>.<p>Not a single anybody outside of the bureaucracy has even identified it as a problem.<p>We have the same thing in Canada: tons of COVID benefits fraudulent. They throw bazillions out the door.<p>Finally - though I don't want to throw smoke over the recent election in the US, it is high time that there are very open and rigorous standard for identification, there's too much at risk. If the government provided the service for free down at the DMV there'd be little excuse.