Reports
Personnel Shortages for Federal Health Care Programs During the COVID-19 Pandemic
Personnel supporting Federal health care programs are a resource critical to the Federal COVID-19 pandemic response efforts. Health care facilities must be prepared for potential personnel shortages and must have plans and processes in place to mitigate these shortages to combat the COVID-19 pandemic and future pandemics. The PRAC will coordinate a review of four Federal health care programs to determine whether these programs, or the providers they reimburse, experienced shortages in health care personnel during the pandemic, the impact of those health care personnel shortages, and strategies used by the Departments to reduce shortages of health care personnel for future pandemics.
COVID-19 – Alert Memo Third-Party Identity Service Contractor
There have been multiple public and private reports that identity service contractors did not provide equitable access to unemployment compensation and mishandled confidential information. We will determine if Employment and Training Administration (ETA) and states provided sufficient oversight from March 27, 2000 – present over facial recognition technology used by identity service contractors.
COVID-19 – Alert Memo: Data Warehousing and Analytics to Prevent UI Fraud
As of March 2021, DOL reported approximately 77 million additional workers had filed initial jobless claims from March 2020 to March 2021. In June 2021, DOL OIG issued a request for updated data to ETA and State Workforce Agencies (SWA) for updated data; once received, OIG data analysis identified $1.3 billion in potentially fraudulent UI benefits paid to claimants in two high-risk categories based on claimant age groups: (1) children under the age of 14 years old, and (2) adults 100 years of age or older. Given the magnitude of payments made to potentially likelihood of ineligible claimants in these age categories groups, we are developing an alert memo to bring immediate attention to this issue.