Excerpted from CalMatters
By Emily Hoeven
Despite repeated warnings from federal authorities that fraudsters would target California, EDD waited six months and processed 7.4 million claims before it began flagging addresses with unusually high numbers of claims, the audit found. In “the most egregious example,” more than 1,700 claims came from a single address. EDD also paid $10.4 billion to claimants with unverified identities and $810 million to prison inmates. State labor officials confirmed this week the total fraud could reach $31 billion.
- Assemblymember Cottie Petrie-Norris, a Laguna Beach Democrat: “This audit makes it clear that EDD lost billions of taxpayer dollars not because they were outwitted by criminal masterminds, but because of basic failures and downright inexcusable mistakes.”