
This made the scam the highest estimated fraud amount in the system, which has paid out $110 billion in unemployment benefits since the beginning of the pandemic. Unemployed Californians wait in a socially distanced line to enter a bookkeeping shop near the U.S.-Mexico border in Imperial County. "Our assessment is that there is activity consistent with fraud in those accounts on the order of approximately $2 billion," the letter read. In a letter written to state legislators, bank officials identified 640,000 accounts with suspicious activity in the state's unemployment benefits system that should be investigated. The Bank of America announced that the billions of dollars in unemployment benefits distributed under contract with the EDD have been stolen. Last month it emerged that over $2 billion has been stolen from California's unemployment fund. The EDD has also been dealing with several issues of widespread fraud. In October, the EDD announced that the millions of backlogged claims would not be cleared until January, leaving Californians who have waited months for benefits with little recourse until the new year. EDD dogged by problemsĮarlier in the pandemic, Senator Wiener and other public officials publicly called out EDD over "unacceptable delays and errors around unemployment benefits" during the pandemic. Newsweek has contacted the EDD and Senator Weiner for comment. tHUWBxkWQp- Senator Scott Wiener May 9, 2020

People shouldn’t be experiencing the severe delays, inability to talk to people with knowledge, & inability to get mistakes fixed. and now we have this."Ģ/ EDD, which administers unemployment, has experienced an unprecedented spike in claims & has outdated technology. He told the broadcaster that the EDD's investigation into the fraudulent activity should not be done in a way that hurts honest people, saying: "People have had to deal with way too much in terms of accessing the benefits, we have this huge backlog in terms of getting people approved. In California, Senator Scott Wiener told Fox News that state officials' officers have received swathes of complaints about the recent EDD account suspensions. were left without funds when federal unemployment benefits briefly lapsed on December 26 before President Donald Trump signed the latest COVID relief and spending package. It comes as jobless claims have continued to rise throughout the pandemic.

But this comes a week after the first notification about payment suspensions, leaving many in the dark about when they might receive their benefits.
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The letter reportedly says that instructions on how to verify identification will come from the EDD on January 6.

