I am in awe everyday at the amount of complete mess this pandemic has brought to light.
We will learn very little as all the data seems corrupt i have only seen one state go back and try to correct their official counts on death as EVERY death is counted as a covid death in many many places.
NOW due to the complete lack of foresight for FRAUD some states mine included have been overrun with fraudulent claims. SO now all the unemployment numbers are corrupted as well. I no longer believe any of the stats.
The company I work for had a ton of claims filed for current staff that were never off of work. I too had someone fill a claim using a previous name and previous address.... one may think the state will catch such glaring errors but the governor told them to side step the basic verify steps to get unemployment out ASAP. Now the state has lost millions to fraud.
I filled out the fraud claim there was actually a choice on form of " not me i am still working"
I do not think they had a chance to pay on this false claim.... but am furious that even the most basic verification would have stopped this one in its tracks.
The state would not even share the info used by fraudsters that might help the victim narrow down where their information was stolen. What job did they list as last employment? / did they have my correct SSN or did they just put random # as with other friends who had claims filed with their name but wrong SSN# ( their state shared information).
I GUESS the BONUS for those of workers and businesses exposed is we get EXTRA work to play ID theft monitoring and watching every credit file.
I think any politician and any person working in unemployment department that did not stand up and say " rushing things through and skipping verification will be a disaster" should be held liable for all the taxpayers loss in this system.
If public employees were held even partially responsible then perhaps they would DO their jobs and when suggested by idiots to circumvent the items in place to safeguard the system ... they would tell them that is a recipe for disaster.
Even if my state will not recover the millions lost i do not think the rest of taxpayers should bail out this mismanagement.
Simply put do NOT believe the NEWS who paint the picture of millions of unemployment claims i know of at least 100 false..personally so i can imagine how WRONG this data is as well.
some places/ people making it worse
May 28th, 2020 at 01:19 pm
May 28th, 2020 at 02:37 pm 1590676644
May 28th, 2020 at 03:30 pm 1590679818
I think you are being very hard on people who did their very best to help desperate people.
I agree the pandemic has exposed a lot wrong in society, but I don’t blame the people who worked through the danger to get funds to those who needed it.
I’m happy to condemn the many willing to defraud.
May 28th, 2020 at 04:02 pm 1590681757
May 28th, 2020 at 04:38 pm 1590683890
I just read this morning that in Florida, the number of recorded deaths due to pneumonia is 5-6 times higher than normal this year. Why? Because many of those people had COVID, but primary cause of death was listed as pneumonia rather than COVID.
The real death rate from COVID is likely several times higher than the "official" count. Pneumonia deaths, heart attack deaths, stroke deaths, blood clot deaths, and more may truly be COVID deaths. So yes, the official number is wrong. It's likely under-counting by thousands of people.
May 28th, 2020 at 06:30 pm 1590690618
May 28th, 2020 at 07:56 pm 1590695795
May 29th, 2020 at 12:18 am 1590711487
I am also aware the death cause was not perfect before crisis but to LEARN from situation being close to ACCURATE data is far more helpful. Assumptions made on BAD data has made this whole thing worse.....
The unemployment situation while the fraud happened many places again we must look at each situation perhaps each state.
If a claim was filed.... I would assume they would run the SSN if it shows NO MATCH to that name etc that should immediately be flagged. Since most all state collect $$ from workers in one way or another, we do not have a state income tax but out of check is funding unemployment and other programs again running a SSN would show we are collecting money from a job 300 miles away from where claim was made another big RED flag .......this is easy to see but ...... when a governors instructions says DO NOT take the time to do these simple verification just assume the honor system was in place and send a direct deposit to an account under yet another name, not the person filing and in many cases an account OVERSEAS .....
Come on there come a point where benefit of doubt is right out the window!
If i was laid off this year or next etc then filed and was told sorry you do not have enough credits in system to collect.... i suppose some would suggest i just try to see it was a difficult situation i can just go without and just say OOPS and move on.
Some issues can happen in a crisis but EXCUSING incompetence never helps in the long run.
May 29th, 2020 at 02:11 am 1590718275
You can't put "government" and "competence" in the same sentence.
When we went to file my daughter's income tax this year, it got kicked back. I don't remember the exact wording of the error message but the system walked us through the troubleshooting and it turned out that her SSN was wrong on the W2 from her old job. We corrected it and could then file just fine.
After that happened, she contacted her old job to let them know about the error and have them issue a corrected W2. Out of curiosity, we pulled her 2018 return and sure enough, the SSN was wrong last year too. It just hadn't triggered a red flag last time. It went through with no problem and we didn't catch the error.
I totally agree that excusing incompetence is not the answer. But I also accept the fact that a perfect system doesn't exist, especially when you're talking about a system that handles tens of millions of transactions. Mistakes are bound to occur. Even if the accuracy rate is 99.9% which would be quite respectable, if you're talking about 100,000,000 transactions, that means there will be 100,000 errors.
May 29th, 2020 at 02:27 am 1590719243
I find it odd that so many as long as it is not them seem to rationalize it.
i did not believe it at first myself but then I looked it up there was direction to not run simple verification.
Doing it CORRECTLY in the first place saves both time and Money.
I also think since it was filed on my information... I should be able to SEE what someone claimed was for example my last employer and dates and such....
I honesty think it is MY state that KNOWS they screwed up bad that says those victimized can't see it... but do not worry they will investigate.....I have seen them in action ....there is NO reason to trust them to do the right thing.
Another person I know lives in another larger state and they shared the false claim information with her to see how much was exposed.
May 29th, 2020 at 04:18 am 1590725898
May 29th, 2020 at 02:51 pm 1590763891
This is so very true, about many things in life. I often use the quote "There's never time to do it right but there's always time to do it over." If people would just take the extra moment to check their work before submitting it, they would save 10 times as much time in the long run.
It certainly seems that if there is a fraudulent claim on your account, you should have access to that information.