Despite an increase in fraud during the pandemic, fraud has historically been uncommon in California’s unemployment benefits, likely “representing less than 1 percent of claims,” the report found. The vast majority of fraud that occurred during the pandemic was concentrated in a temporary federal program that has now ended.
The department’s actions during the pandemic suggest that getting payments to workers is not its highest priority, the report said. For example, the department disqualified about 1 in 4 unemployment benefits claims during the pandemic for failing to respond to the department’s requests for additional information — or because the department was not able to process the additional information provided in the allotted time frame.written by a strike team assembled by Gov.
When asked about this discrepancy, the department said it had interpreted the requirement to report to the Legislature to mean the number of people who were found not to qualify under state and federal eligibility rules, and so it did not report the number of people being disqualified by procedural rules.
“We’re just seeing the result of a bureaucratic system that wasn’t capable of doing its fundamental mission,” Patterson said. If people who lose their jobs in an economic downturn don’t have unemployment benefits, she said, then they have to pull back on their spending — making a bad situation worse. So unemployment benefits are meant to act as a stabilizer, giving laid-off workers some money to spend and blunting a downward spiral for the whole economy.
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