Criminals exploit Washington State unemployment system in the largest fraud in state history

Seattle Times:

Revelations last week that this spring’s $576 million unemployment fraud, the largest in state history, started much earlier than previously acknowledged have spurred a storm of new questions over the handling of the crime.

Data released Aug. 3 by the state Employment Security Department (ESD) shows that criminals were filing fake claims in the first week of March. That’s more than two months before ESD publicly disclosed the fraud and temporarily froze benefit payments, in mid-May, by which time a staggering 56% of the weekly claims ESD was paying were from criminals, many of them reportedly overseas.

But even before Monday’s disclosures, some state lawmakers and others were questioning whether ESD had inadvertently abetted the scam by lowering fraud detection protocols to speed up legitimate claims by hundreds of thousands of Washingtonians left jobless by the pandemic.
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Apparently, the criminals were not just locals exploiting the system.  When over half the claims being paid were going to criminals it demonstrates a systematic failure on a grand scale.