Courthouse News wrote:
Inmates and imposters ran up a $10 billion tab on California taxpayers’
dime during the opening stretches of the pandemic, taking advantage
of the state’s dithering and deficient management of its massive
unemployment benefit system, according to a new state audit.

With millions of new unemployment claims swamping the system, State
Auditor Elaine Howle says the Employment Development Department
buckled and issued payments for over four months without first
verifying identities. As a result, the audit found that nearly 10% of the
$111 billion in unemployment benefits the state paid as of December
2020 were fraudulent, including hundreds of millions to inmates.

In her second scathing audit of the department this week, Howle says
the agency didn’t take the fraud threat seriously despite warnings from
the federal government, and that deserving claimants are still bearing
the impact of the department’s failures.