I'm well aware of the common cognitive dissonance whereby a system which you are not familiar with seems like it should be trivial. But I'm having a hard time understanding where the complexity of these systems actually lie.
State and Federal employment records already exist with your social security number, address, employer address, employer ID number, and amount of taxes that have been withheld. I can retrieve my own copy of this record online from the IRS and my own state relatively easily.
Someone should not be able to [automatically] claim unemployment benefits for past income on which taxes have not been withheld, or estimated taxes have not been paid. That seems trivially fair. Even people making minimum wage will have payroll taxes withheld. Calculating an upper limit on the amount that can be processed automatically should therefore be trivial.
Next is the question of where to send the payment. DMVs cover a large percentage of the population. Beyond the DMV, there's voter registration, credit reports, address of record for where the last tax refund was sent, utility bills, phone records.
When I had a larger than typical refund last year, my state sent me a letter asking for copies of my and my wife's social security cards, passports, and utility bills before they would issue the refund. I felt that was pretty burdensome considering I was requesting the refund to the same exact bank account number which I had been paying them from for the last 5 years.
It's obvious the state is just totally incapable of running even the simplest of validation rules. It's just helicopter money dropping from the sky, and they don't really care who gets it, because it's not their money. It's not like anyone is going to lose their job or not get re-elected because of it.
The fact that's it's so easy to funnel all this money out of the country is a pretty wild indictment of FinCEN and the like.
>I'm well aware of the common cognitive dissonance whereby a system which you are not familiar with seems like it should be trivial.
I build these sorts of things and while it's not trivial it's also really not that hard. It's just insane the amount of money the government will spend on crap.
The field I work in is pretty small and I know a decent amount of the developers that use it. One project I worked on for the government, I showed up on day one and ran into a few people that had either no desire or no ability to do development work. And they were in team lead/senior roles.
Then, come to find out that you can't do anything for the project until you have a background check. And, by anything, I mean anything. No meetings, e-mails, or anything with an armed guard enforcing it. So there was an office full of people billing out at $200+ an hour for months doing literally nothing.
Then, come to find out that the way they wanted the software couldn't do. Like within an hour of hearing the requirements and what they were building I knew that it (1) wasn't possible and (2) the design they chose had fundamental flaws. Several years of effort and 10s of millions of dollars later they gave up on it.
The government is just a big whale too dumb, corrupt, and/or lazy to defend itself while a gigantic swarm of consultants/vendors are ripping off hunks of its flesh like the sharks they are.
I think the public focus on cost has paradoxically led to this situation. If you’re a good engineer, why work for the government? The compensation is extremely poor compared to industry, especially in tech. The lazy/incompetent people at the top have remained there because they’re too lazy/incompetent to leave for much greener pastures. If you fired them, their replacements will be at least as bad (on average, there are some passionate and competent people), since now the pay is poor and evidently there isn’t even job security.
We’ve built a system where we refuse to pay public servants. We shouldn’t be surprised when a system designed to attract below average people leads to projects with below average results.
Step 1: Fire all engineers on government money, to decrease "overhead" and let "industry" do it
Step 2: Parent post
Step 3: Government is inefficient, inept, if not outright corrupt, we must gut it further! Goto Step 1.
The other day I was getting data from the USGS, and it was remarkable how well structured, sorted, searchable the data was, how it came in high quality, with a custom-built downloader applet that worked very nicely actoss multiple machines. I went from zero to complete solution in QGIS in one day. It's not all that bad.
The saddest thing I witnessed were consultants like you describe bragging about how easy it is "to milk the cow" (to quote one). They bragged that they never earned their bonus in such an easy way.
“There are four ways in which you can spend money. You can spend your own money on yourself. When you do that, then you really watch out what you’re doing, and you try to get the most for your money.
Then you can spend your own money on somebody else. For example, I buy a birthday present for someone. Well, then I’m not so careful about the content of the present, but I’m very careful about the cost.
Then, I can spend somebody else’s money on myself. And if I spend somebody else’s money on myself, then I’m sure going to have a good lunch!
Finally, I can spend somebody else’s money on somebody else. And if I spend somebody else’s money on somebody else, I’m not concerned about how much it is, and I’m not concerned about what I get.
And that’s government.”
-Milton Friedman
I also worked on a state unemployment system, and it was much the same. Took a couple weeks to get my laptop, but I still had to come in and sit in a chair and read the physical newspaper. When it did arrive, it took the better part of an hour to run the build.
That was the last government work I ever did. I lasted about 3 months.
The system is intentionally complex and high friction, like most social programs in the US. We spend a lot of time trying to make sure people who "don't deserve" help can't get it. It's a political win for both parties.
The tricky part is as a society, we haven't trained many people for jobs where you build sociotechnical systems: processes and systems that have a major human element in it, and a major automated/computation element in it.
We have computer scientists who can make robust pure software systems with theoretical guarantees, and work well at scale. And we have political and administrative professionals who can converge on decisions and policies with actors with different motivations and rationality. But it's hard to do both really well at the same time, especially on the first try.
The government intentionally diffuses responsibility for all the same reasons corporations do.
The government does not have much incentive to work efficiently because of use it or lose it budgeting. You ever notice how you only ever see stories of efficiency coming from cash strapped departments and poor cities? This is why
We don't want the government to have all the databases interlinked. There's too much potential for abuse and when you're talking about state or nation scale programs your "rare" edge cases result in tens of thousands or millions of people being shafted.
You would also think that an unemployement claim might have a red flag thrown if it's still reporting unemployment taxes because the person is still working. My company had many individuals that were notified the state had been paying out claims in their name...but they had been receiving paychecks the entire time. Washington had an auto-accept policy without any verification until things could be verified, but by that time hundreds of millions were gone.
The unemployment schemes in Colorado and California have been a total disaster. I received a unemployment debit card in the mail - as well as a claim number. Called the state, filed a FTC report, and called the bank. None of them really cared or did anything about it.
In California - the scale of the graft was so bad that they have had to pause the program multiple times.
I’m a bit surprised at CO being incompetent, and I’d like to hear more. Generally my observation has been that states with one party rule have been less effective than states where both parties have to compete for the approval of the electorate. Based on the last time I lived in CO, I would’ve put it in the latter category.
This happened to me in CO. I received two debit cards in the mail earlier this Summer to a previous address, one for the one CO uses to distribute unemployment benefits, one for an Internet-only bank based out of CA. I think the fraudster got my info from CO's voter registration record, which is public by default. The address on there hasn't been updated.
I had to fight the CA bank over the course of several weeks before they would close my account, and only after I had filed a complaint with the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Pro tip: do this for any financial disputes; financial firms will be very responsive to your issues.
I also called the bank CO uses to distribute unemployment benefits and they were much more amenable to my request to close the account.
For CO's part, the only link they provided on the CO Dept of Labor's site to report fraud (a Google form) had language to basically say that I am reporting myself as the fraudster and I would be subject to perjury in filing the report. For obvious reasons, I didn't fill it out. (It took them months to change the form.) I then called their main phone number and the only way I could talk to anyone was to schedule a callback 2-3 months later.
Ended up freezing all of my credit bureau accounts.
BTW, I don't place this fault entirely on CO. It was a hectic and uncertain time and they were trying to distribute funds into people's hands as quickly as possible. I don't expect them to be able to change such a complicated process overnight, or even months. It's a clear example of fraudsters being well ahead of regulators.
My mom got an unemployment card (US Bank handles it in CO) in the mail and she’s never worked; she’s a disabled senior. My dad called the bank and they didn’t care, and he called the state and they didn’t care either. This was around 3 weeks ago
We moved into a new house a month ago, after we lost our old one in a fire. Since we've been at the new address, we've received probably 50 letters from Unemployment addressed to many obviously fake names. About half look like they contain checks. We're trying to get in touch with our state unemployment office, but they're nearly impossible to contact right now.
> Is it too much to ask for a government that both governs and is actually competent?
This is the question put to the voters at every election, and at every election the voters vote no to this type of government. So it isn't too much to ask, but it isn't what the people want.
It just seems that asking antiquated unemployment systems to handle a huuuge increase in users in a time of pandemic where employees are getting sick or staying home just seems like a monumental scaling task.
I still believe that in times of crisis it's easier to go for a simple solution (just giving automatic, direct, unconditional cash to people) than to try to make a complex solution even more complex (changing the rules on who is considered unemployed, where millions now had to figure out how to use a system they've never used before).
Why couldn't they just take that $600 extra per week and distribute it to every adult in the country?
Each party is dedicated to making sure that their constituents and only their constituents get money. After all, if the other guys can write endless checks for you, why on earth would they vote for the other guy.
Also, sooner or later the US dollar's reserve status will disappear, and all of a sudden, all of the money supply we have flushed into the economy will manifest as inflation.
Do they have to also steal the debit card for this scam to work? I'm a little confused with how they get money out of this if the debit cards go to your real address.
I suspect they would have control of the account that the state set up to distribute benefits since they had enough information to file the claim in the first place; but the non-mailing contact info would be email and phone number that they control. Once the funds have been distributed, they'd be notified and then make the transfer to the second account set up at another bank. From there...poof...
This is probably why a second bank account was opened up in my name. This bank's KYC controls were so lax that they didn't even bother to do a credit inquiry on me, which would have resulted in a notice to me from a credit monitoring service that I use.
> Is it too much to ask for a government that both governs and is actually competent?
Evidently yes. They can barely govern let alone manage technical infrastructure. Just look at the abysmal vaccine roll-out. 9 months to plan for it; that's an eternity in the software development world where we're constantly faced with logical and logistical issues on the daily. We can have millions of people streaming gigabytes of data all at once, millions of people submitting their tax returns, millions of packages being delivered every hour and yet we couldn't pull this off in 9 freakin months? I don't buy any of their excuses. It's just sheer incompetence and it makes me so mad.
That's not to say they don't have challenges. Outdated systems, obsolete programs, hell even outdated employees; I know so many rejects that end up managing government systems because they couldn't cut it in corporate. One of them is a good friend of mine. He got let go when he tried to replace a modern web-app with a WinForms app. He's actually a very good person and intelligent, but a horrible dev and I've no idea how he ever got into software development, but the government gig he has loves him.
> We can have millions of people streaming gigabytes of data all at once, millions of people submitting their tax returns, millions of packages being delivered every hour and yet we couldn't pull this off in 9 freakin months?
That streaming wasn't rolled out instantly. It took years of building network infrastructure to get to this point.
You might say that rolling out the vaccine is trivial in comparison. But the vaccine requires building a minus-80-degree cold chain. That's... not a trivial task.
In a functioning democracy the top bosses are ultimately the voters. The voters are free to reject the next slate of incumbents coming up for re-election and choose individuals that express technical command of policy.
36 billion is an almost comical number without some sort of meaningful supporting evidence. I think it warrants serious consideration if this HN article should be flagged or not.
agree, and .. wondering out loud how much "fake - look over THERE" is going on to cover actual corruption within the USA over these benefits, by those connected to the US system somehow
1) US foreign aid generally consists of money earmarked to buy goods from specific cronies in the US for specific elites in the target country. This lagniappe creates influence over those elites that greases other private import/export political/banking schemes between that country and large US firms.
2) That aid is generally also contingent on not taking aid from designated US state enemies like Russia and China, who are often eager to create the same relationship with the target country. Our eternal aid to Egypt, for example, would be happily replaced almost instantly if we withdrew it, along with any Egyptian weapons and infrastructure contracts with US firms.
My uncle works in cybercrime for a city PD. He says people in his city are regularly tricked into sending their life savings via bitcoin ATMs to Nigerian scammers.
It’s a good idea, but unlikely to move the needle very much. According to the article Nigerians are taking in ~$18B in unemployment scams. This dwarfs the money coming from foreign aid. In a country with rampant corruption the scammers will simply bribe the authorities and continue as normal. The government will respond to international pressure by making a few high profile arrests for publicity, without taking serious measures to stem the problem. Meanwhile the vulnerable systems of state governments will still be vulnerable. Better to just pay the cost of
a software upgrade for the first time in 40 years.
Chances are the officials don’t want to stem the problem. $18B is a non trivial amount of money to inject into a country like Nigeria with a GDP of $448B (2019). No sane politician is going to purposefully cut off 4% of the GDP, especially when the costs are externalized to another country.
18B? Just how many of persons doing this in Nigeria could there be? I somewhat doubt that the figure can be that high. That is millions of individual cases, which would mean that there is thousands or tens of thousand people involved and even more with processing the money on the way...
If withdrawal of aid isn't sufficient you can use sanctions against the nation in question or even against nations that opt to trade with that nation. It logically wouldn't take much to tip Nigeria into a further clusterfuck.
Foreign aid is never intended to help the people of a nation. It's used by high-income democratic nations to support autocratic policies and resource extraction.
I doubt very much of that 793M makes it to any of the people pulling these scams. It's typically used as legal bribes for the governments of those countries, who distributed it to all their cronies at the top, in order to maintain power and sell national resources to the US/EU and others at very low prices.
The Dictators Handbook by Mesquita and Smith go into more details on how this works.
That's kind of the point - hold the 'foreign aid' funds from the nation, until said nation does something to combat the fraud.
You can't actively police your laws inside a foreign nation, but with some level of control (i.e. $793M/a in "foreign aid" held over their heads), you can tell the nation what you want them to do about things affecting you. Chances are good they're going to comply.
How is collective punishment the issue? Is cutting off aid for an entire country acceptable because of a few bad actors? If anything, wouldn't cutting off aid just increase the need for wealth transfer? If I'm Nigeria, and I'm scamming to the tune of billions, why do I care about small sums?
When the country in question isn’t taking action against this widespread issue then I’d say it’s acceptable. It’s not just a few bad actors. People are regularly being scammed out of their life savings.
It's so stupid that they mail recipients for legal liability after the crime, but couldn't mail them and notify that unemployment is beggining before payments are made.
step 1) Verify the unemployed mailing address is the same as on the bank account you are sending to. If it is not the same for legitimate reasons,
step 2) Mail a pin code to the local address.
step 3) Collecting unemployment requires entering that pin.
I'm sure there are some edge cases to work out, but this isn't rocket science.
And meanwhile my unemployment payments sit at 0 nearly four months after filing. Just sitting at pending a determination. Can't get anyone to answer the phone or e-mail.
I have a friend who works as support staff at a school. She was out of work from March when the schools closed to August when they reopened. She still hasn't gotten a cent.
I'm sorry this is happening to you. Unfortunately there will be no consequences for anyone responsible.
In Washington state, the unemployment agency has been hindering investigations to the point that a public warning has been issued to the agency's leaders about it from the investigators (https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/politics/washingto...). The head of this agency recently claimed that $357M of $600M has been recovered. However, it is hard to trust this figure because the agency has already been called out for misstating financial impact (https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/times-watchdog/sta...).
What's really damning is the level of incompetence. Washington state's unemployment agency went an entire year without standard anti-fraud checks, leaving them broken that entire time. They only fixed it this year, seemingly because this unprecedented level of fraud caught the public's attention. The agency's leader, Suzi LeVine, was picked by Governor Jay Inslee to lead this agency as a "natural fit". But the reality is that it was a nepotistic appointment - LeVine was a Sales and Marketing executive at Expedia and then US ambassador to Switzerland. Her early career work experience at Microsoft was more technical but it was too long ago and too limited to give her "tech credentials". However, she was a prominent DNC fundraiser and donated significantly to Inslee's campaigns (https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/politics/how-democ...), so here we are.
It is hard from the article to see where they pull the $36b headline number from...
“California officials drew headlines recently for announcing they suspect as much as $2 billion was paid out in improper payments. Other states have reported lower losses: $242 million in Massachusetts, $200 million in Michigan, $18 million in Rhode Island, $8 million in Arizona and $6 million in Wisconsin.”
California is about 15% of US GDP, so even if many other states were hit much worse, getting to $36b is hard.
Readit News
State and Federal employment records already exist with your social security number, address, employer address, employer ID number, and amount of taxes that have been withheld. I can retrieve my own copy of this record online from the IRS and my own state relatively easily.
Someone should not be able to [automatically] claim unemployment benefits for past income on which taxes have not been withheld, or estimated taxes have not been paid. That seems trivially fair. Even people making minimum wage will have payroll taxes withheld. Calculating an upper limit on the amount that can be processed automatically should therefore be trivial.
Next is the question of where to send the payment. DMVs cover a large percentage of the population. Beyond the DMV, there's voter registration, credit reports, address of record for where the last tax refund was sent, utility bills, phone records.
When I had a larger than typical refund last year, my state sent me a letter asking for copies of my and my wife's social security cards, passports, and utility bills before they would issue the refund. I felt that was pretty burdensome considering I was requesting the refund to the same exact bank account number which I had been paying them from for the last 5 years.
It's obvious the state is just totally incapable of running even the simplest of validation rules. It's just helicopter money dropping from the sky, and they don't really care who gets it, because it's not their money. It's not like anyone is going to lose their job or not get re-elected because of it.
The fact that's it's so easy to funnel all this money out of the country is a pretty wild indictment of FinCEN and the like.
I build these sorts of things and while it's not trivial it's also really not that hard. It's just insane the amount of money the government will spend on crap.
The field I work in is pretty small and I know a decent amount of the developers that use it. One project I worked on for the government, I showed up on day one and ran into a few people that had either no desire or no ability to do development work. And they were in team lead/senior roles.
Then, come to find out that you can't do anything for the project until you have a background check. And, by anything, I mean anything. No meetings, e-mails, or anything with an armed guard enforcing it. So there was an office full of people billing out at $200+ an hour for months doing literally nothing.
Then, come to find out that the way they wanted the software couldn't do. Like within an hour of hearing the requirements and what they were building I knew that it (1) wasn't possible and (2) the design they chose had fundamental flaws. Several years of effort and 10s of millions of dollars later they gave up on it.
The government is just a big whale too dumb, corrupt, and/or lazy to defend itself while a gigantic swarm of consultants/vendors are ripping off hunks of its flesh like the sharks they are.
We’ve built a system where we refuse to pay public servants. We shouldn’t be surprised when a system designed to attract below average people leads to projects with below average results.
Step 2: Parent post
Step 3: Government is inefficient, inept, if not outright corrupt, we must gut it further! Goto Step 1.
The other day I was getting data from the USGS, and it was remarkable how well structured, sorted, searchable the data was, how it came in high quality, with a custom-built downloader applet that worked very nicely actoss multiple machines. I went from zero to complete solution in QGIS in one day. It's not all that bad.
Then you can spend your own money on somebody else. For example, I buy a birthday present for someone. Well, then I’m not so careful about the content of the present, but I’m very careful about the cost.
Then, I can spend somebody else’s money on myself. And if I spend somebody else’s money on myself, then I’m sure going to have a good lunch!
Finally, I can spend somebody else’s money on somebody else. And if I spend somebody else’s money on somebody else, I’m not concerned about how much it is, and I’m not concerned about what I get. And that’s government.” -Milton Friedman
That was the last government work I ever did. I lasted about 3 months.
We have computer scientists who can make robust pure software systems with theoretical guarantees, and work well at scale. And we have political and administrative professionals who can converge on decisions and policies with actors with different motivations and rationality. But it's hard to do both really well at the same time, especially on the first try.
The government does not have much incentive to work efficiently because of use it or lose it budgeting. You ever notice how you only ever see stories of efficiency coming from cash strapped departments and poor cities? This is why
We don't want the government to have all the databases interlinked. There's too much potential for abuse and when you're talking about state or nation scale programs your "rare" edge cases result in tens of thousands or millions of people being shafted.
Which isn't to say that automated systems couldn't catch more of it, I just wonder what the scale is.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/apr/15/florida-unem...
In California - the scale of the graft was so bad that they have had to pause the program multiple times.
https://abc7.com/unemployment-california-edd-backlog-ca-wher...
Is it too much to ask for a government that both governs and is actually competent?
I’m a bit surprised at CO being incompetent, and I’d like to hear more. Generally my observation has been that states with one party rule have been less effective than states where both parties have to compete for the approval of the electorate. Based on the last time I lived in CO, I would’ve put it in the latter category.
I had to fight the CA bank over the course of several weeks before they would close my account, and only after I had filed a complaint with the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Pro tip: do this for any financial disputes; financial firms will be very responsive to your issues.
I also called the bank CO uses to distribute unemployment benefits and they were much more amenable to my request to close the account.
For CO's part, the only link they provided on the CO Dept of Labor's site to report fraud (a Google form) had language to basically say that I am reporting myself as the fraudster and I would be subject to perjury in filing the report. For obvious reasons, I didn't fill it out. (It took them months to change the form.) I then called their main phone number and the only way I could talk to anyone was to schedule a callback 2-3 months later.
Ended up freezing all of my credit bureau accounts.
BTW, I don't place this fault entirely on CO. It was a hectic and uncertain time and they were trying to distribute funds into people's hands as quickly as possible. I don't expect them to be able to change such a complicated process overnight, or even months. It's a clear example of fraudsters being well ahead of regulators.
This is the question put to the voters at every election, and at every election the voters vote no to this type of government. So it isn't too much to ask, but it isn't what the people want.
I still believe that in times of crisis it's easier to go for a simple solution (just giving automatic, direct, unconditional cash to people) than to try to make a complex solution even more complex (changing the rules on who is considered unemployed, where millions now had to figure out how to use a system they've never used before).
Why couldn't they just take that $600 extra per week and distribute it to every adult in the country?
Each party is dedicated to making sure that their constituents and only their constituents get money. After all, if the other guys can write endless checks for you, why on earth would they vote for the other guy.
Also, sooner or later the US dollar's reserve status will disappear, and all of a sudden, all of the money supply we have flushed into the economy will manifest as inflation.
This is probably why a second bank account was opened up in my name. This bank's KYC controls were so lax that they didn't even bother to do a credit inquiry on me, which would have resulted in a notice to me from a credit monitoring service that I use.
Dead Comment
Evidently yes. They can barely govern let alone manage technical infrastructure. Just look at the abysmal vaccine roll-out. 9 months to plan for it; that's an eternity in the software development world where we're constantly faced with logical and logistical issues on the daily. We can have millions of people streaming gigabytes of data all at once, millions of people submitting their tax returns, millions of packages being delivered every hour and yet we couldn't pull this off in 9 freakin months? I don't buy any of their excuses. It's just sheer incompetence and it makes me so mad.
That's not to say they don't have challenges. Outdated systems, obsolete programs, hell even outdated employees; I know so many rejects that end up managing government systems because they couldn't cut it in corporate. One of them is a good friend of mine. He got let go when he tried to replace a modern web-app with a WinForms app. He's actually a very good person and intelligent, but a horrible dev and I've no idea how he ever got into software development, but the government gig he has loves him.
EDIT: here's another user post in this thread that somewhat echoes my last paragraph: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25586066
That streaming wasn't rolled out instantly. It took years of building network infrastructure to get to this point.
You might say that rolling out the vaccine is trivial in comparison. But the vaccine requires building a minus-80-degree cold chain. That's... not a trivial task.
nowhere is a source linked or cited other than a federal official for 36 billion during the month of november
nowhere on https://www.hudoig.gov (the OIG official site) can I find this report.
36 billion is an almost comical number without some sort of meaningful supporting evidence. I think it warrants serious consideration if this HN article should be flagged or not.
https://explorer.usaid.gov/cd/NGA
Perhaps this should be conditioned on punishing these criminals or just suspended for the next few years
2) That aid is generally also contingent on not taking aid from designated US state enemies like Russia and China, who are often eager to create the same relationship with the target country. Our eternal aid to Egypt, for example, would be happily replaced almost instantly if we withdrew it, along with any Egyptian weapons and infrastructure contracts with US firms.
Foreign aid is not charity.
It’s super widespread.
I doubt very much of that 793M makes it to any of the people pulling these scams. It's typically used as legal bribes for the governments of those countries, who distributed it to all their cronies at the top, in order to maintain power and sell national resources to the US/EU and others at very low prices.
The Dictators Handbook by Mesquita and Smith go into more details on how this works.
You can't actively police your laws inside a foreign nation, but with some level of control (i.e. $793M/a in "foreign aid" held over their heads), you can tell the nation what you want them to do about things affecting you. Chances are good they're going to comply.
Wouldn't those be exactly the people you need in order to stop these scams?
step 1) Verify the unemployed mailing address is the same as on the bank account you are sending to. If it is not the same for legitimate reasons,
step 2) Mail a pin code to the local address. step 3) Collecting unemployment requires entering that pin.
I'm sure there are some edge cases to work out, but this isn't rocket science.
I'm sorry this is happening to you. Unfortunately there will be no consequences for anyone responsible.
What's really damning is the level of incompetence. Washington state's unemployment agency went an entire year without standard anti-fraud checks, leaving them broken that entire time. They only fixed it this year, seemingly because this unprecedented level of fraud caught the public's attention. The agency's leader, Suzi LeVine, was picked by Governor Jay Inslee to lead this agency as a "natural fit". But the reality is that it was a nepotistic appointment - LeVine was a Sales and Marketing executive at Expedia and then US ambassador to Switzerland. Her early career work experience at Microsoft was more technical but it was too long ago and too limited to give her "tech credentials". However, she was a prominent DNC fundraiser and donated significantly to Inslee's campaigns (https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/politics/how-democ...), so here we are.
“California officials drew headlines recently for announcing they suspect as much as $2 billion was paid out in improper payments. Other states have reported lower losses: $242 million in Massachusetts, $200 million in Michigan, $18 million in Rhode Island, $8 million in Arizona and $6 million in Wisconsin.”
California is about 15% of US GDP, so even if many other states were hit much worse, getting to $36b is hard.