Reports

In September 2022, the Office of Inspector General (OIG) alerted U.S. Department of Labor to over $45 billion in potential fraud paid in four high-risk areas. One high-risk area was Unemployment Insurance (UI) claimants filing with suspicious email accounts. Through Employment and Training Administration (ETA), the OIG provided states with underlying methodology as well as specific claimant information for follow-up action. This audit will examine the extent to which ETA and states have taken action to follow up on potentially fraudulent CARES Act UI claims filed with suspicious email accounts identified and referred by the OIG.

Independent Review of 4003(b) Loan Recipient’s Validation Memo – Republic Airways, Inc.

This audit focuses on information and recommendations we can provide to improve the Oregon Employment Department's (OED) unemployment insurance system ahead of future surges in unemployment, similar to the COVID-19 pandemic. We have found that OED has made progress addressing some of the most public concerns, such as the inability of its phone-based system to handle the spike in claims that occurred in March 2020. Additionally, Oregon fared comparatively well in terms of fraud within their unemployment insurance program.

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.

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. 

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.