Monday, July 9, 2012

Great News: 11% of all unemployment payments are fraudulent

From Hot Air today.

Amazing simply amazing. We extend out unemployment benefits to 99 weeks and what does that allow? It allows even more time for people to defraud the government before they have to find a new way to do it. 14 Billion in payments made last year were illegal. That's just wonderful.
The worst offender was Indiana, which apparently goes out of its way to reward the fraud. How can I say that? Easy, they made more fraudulent payments than legal ones. That my friends is the very epitome of trying.

But of the overpaid funds, most end up in the hands of three types of people: Those who aren’t actively searching for a job, those who were fired or quit voluntarily, and those who continue to file claims even though they’ve returned to work. Any of those circumstances would make a person ineligible for benefits.

In what should cause everyone a good chuckle, the Sheriff himself Joe Biden is going to lead the charge to recover all those precious funds, after all there are plenty of solar panel companies that we can throw that money away on. Just think about how much longer Solyndra would have been in business with an extra 14 billion dollars.

From the story at CNN

Ryan Greminger, 36, of Richmond, Ind. collected unemployment benefits while serving two years in a county jail for a drug-related crime.
"It's not like some big scheme I thought of," he said. Greminger had been laid off from a factory in 2007 and was originally collecting unemployment benefits legally. After he landed in jail, another inmate urged him to keep filing the claims.
"I paid this guy $50 each time to have his girlfriend -- a woman I had never met -- file my unemployment claims."
Greminger said he knew it was wrong at the time, but he went along with the plan because he needed child support money for his fiancé and their four kids. Out of prison now, he's currently working to repay more than $14,000 to the state.

I'm glad to know that the overhead fee for defrauding the government these days is only 50 bucks. That seems shockingly low. But I guess it's better than doing it for free.

However don't get down on unemployment, they aren't even the worst offenders. That belongs to the "School Lunch Program".

The really good news is that the Labor Dept, you know the same dept that wasted 14 billion dollars, says that almost 50% is recoverable. Except that on average they barley get a quarter back of what is actually recoverable. So lets see. 14 billion, 7 billion recoverable/25% = 1.75 billion might actually be recovered. I mean Joe Biden is leading the charge so that should happen right?

However jail time is rare because "the government wants to see people continue working and paying back the system". Because these people have definitely proven a propensity for finding legal jobs and doing whats right.

Oh but don't worry if you didn't "mean to" defraud the government you can ask for a waiver.

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