Ohio Fights To Get Fraud Out of Unemployment Claims

As of earlier this week, Dec 14 to be exact, Ohio lawmakers worked to pass a bill that is aimed at ridding its statewide unemployment system of fraud. Unemployment, like SNAP benefits and Section 8, is a federal program that's administered independently by the states. So it's a state's job to hand out benefits to people who are unemployed, and also that state's job to stop any sort of fraud. All states answer to the federal government on the issue, and the federal government writes the rules, but it's the states' responsibility to run the program. This is why you see some states with a lot more fraud than others. Ohio for instance, has a lot of fraud in its system, only matched by much larger states like California and Florida. Ohio's unemployment fraud is rampant.

This new bill, Senate Bill 302, would force the applicants to prove who they are with proper identification. If you can believe it, this was not a law in Ohio previously. People filing for unemployment did not have to prove their identities, yet Ohio's government seems very confused about how fraud could have happened. If this were social media, you would probably be entering a laughing emoji right about now.

Of course, fraud is no laughing matter. Billions of dollars end up stolen from the pool of these assistance programs, and that just means that people who actually need the money are not getting it. Other parts of the law would require Ohio's government services to verify that the applicant had a job, while also verifying their income. Again, these are things that were not done previously, for whatever reasons.

In Ohio specifically, over an estimated $1 billion has been defrauded from unemployment benefits, and they estimate that there are thousands of fraudulent claims in the system right now. The negative side of this, however, is that a lot of people are going to be hurt who would have otherwise received benefits. People who are self-employed, or whose employer does not keep good records, etc, may lose their benefits or not be able to receive them.
 

Anti-Fraud Measures Are Hurting the Unemployment, Maybe on Purpose

The more the government meddles in the affairs of the unemployment program, the less money it actually pays out. Every single time these governments try to make the process harder for scammers to get in, all it actually does is keep good people away from benefits. The irony here is that the Democrats know this very well, as they make the exact same argument for why voter ID is a bad idea that will disenfranchise those eligible to vote. It's just that this issue isn't on the government's list of top priorities, and some suspect that this is intentional.

Did you know that if someone is not collecting an unemployment check, they are not counted by the government as unemployed? So, mathematically, if you had 10,000 people to count as employed or unemployed, and 6,000 of them weren't working, yet only 2,000 of them could draw unemployment, then the unemployment rate would officially be 20% when it should be much higher. Yes, that's every bit as shady as it reads. The way the numbers are compiled don't have a single thing to do with the actual unemployment rate; rather, they're compiled based on metrics that are designed, at best, to inspire consumer confidence. However, some are a bit more cynical and claim that the government calculates unemployment this way in order to always boast and brag about a strong economy. You live in the country; you know how much you're spending to live, and how short-staffed businesses are. You can be the judge of how well the economy's doing.

The larger point here is that either way you slice it, whether it's actually to reduce fraud or to keep the Presidential administration looking more competent, millions of Americans are hurting because they cannot draw unemployment. Theoretically, it is their money to draw, as unemployment funds are a tax, meaning it's money distributed by the government; and this means that it falls under the entitlement category of the government's own laws. Though expecting the government to follow its own laws is like expecting the politicians to take a pay cut during the inflation they caused. It's just not going to happen.

No one wants to see fraud in unemployment, but if it's at the expense of people being able to feed their families, then something else has to give. Good people cannot be punished just because bad people exist.