

Just over 300,000 workers have taken steps to validate their accounts, said Loree Levy, a spokesperson for the EDD. That indicates that another 1.1 million workers continue to face suspended payments while their accounts are verified by the EDD. Gavin Newsom appointed a new director of the troubled agency, its second since February. Criminals took advantage of the situation.”Īs fraud concerns increased, the EDD suspended unemployment payments to 1.4 million California workers - and has made only modest progress in unfreezing those red-flagged accounts. “California did not have sufficient security measures in place to prevent this level of fraud. “There is no sugarcoating this,” Su said. In a prepared release issued after Su’s comments, the EDD said the precise count of confirmed fraudulent claims so far is 9.7 percent. State officials conceded California wasn’t ready to combat the fraudulent attempts. The state has already acknowledged that it has paid about $400 million in the names of prison inmates, and last month, federal prosecutors charged a former state labor agency worker, a prison inmate and a parolee in a scheme to defraud California’s scandal-scarred unemployment insurance system.

If 27 percent of the claims are determined to be fraudulent, that would amount to more than $30 billion.Ĭrime rings operating out of Nigeria, China and Russia have unleashed a wave of fraud that has focused on California’s unemployment benefits as their most tempting target. “Roughly 10% of the $114 billion in claims are confirmed fraudulent, another 17% are potentially fraudulent,” California Labor Secretary Julie Su said during a question-and-answer session regarding the EDD’s efforts to combat unemployment insurance fraud.


ID.me’s role in this partnership is exclusively regarding identity verification.
#California edd verification#
The California Employment Development Department (California EDD) has partnered with ID.me to create a highly secure identity verification process that ensures you-and only you-will be able to access your benefits.
