Economics
The U.S. Unemployment System Is Plagued by $63 Billion in Fraud and Dysfunction
Attempts to filter out large quantities of illicit claims are contributing to already huge backlogs.
Illustration: Maxime Mouysset for Bloomberg Businessweek
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President Biden’s $1.9 trillion economic stimulus package will send billions of dollars to America’s jobless. It’s also a potential bonanza for scammers.
Throughout the Covid crisis, unemployment programs have served as a lifeline, channeling more than $650 billion over the past year to millions of struggling households. But the state-run agencies that distribute the funds have been overwhelmed, making their harried staff as well as their glitchy computer systems easy prey for criminals.