As the Federal government is looking to recover and make sense of the rampant unemployment insurance (UI) fraud seen during the COVID-19 pandemic, experts today told members of Congress that the government is in dire need of a technology overhaul to keep up with fraudulent actors who are leveraging emerging technologies such as AI to steal taxpayer money.

The Government Accountability Office (GAO) is estimating that unemployment insurance fraud during the COVID-19 pandemic reached a range of $100 billion to $135 billion – way up from the $60 billion the watchdog agency previously estimated earlier this year.

The Labor Department (DoL) estimated this week that the overpayment rate for its Pandemic Unemployment Assistance (PUA) program reached 17 percent between March 2020 and September 2021 as the coronavirus pandemic gripped the nation.

House Republicans introduced legislation on Feb. 24 that aims to help recover billions of dollars of unemployment insurance (UI) benefits estimated to have been stolen by fraudsters during the pandemic.

The Department of Labor (DOL) – which provides funding and assistance to states to run their unemployment insurance (UI) programs – remains in need of a better strategy to help prevent UI fraud in light of large-scale fraud in the program during the coronavirus pandemic, according to a new report from the Government Accountability Office (GAO).