Tag Archives: Unemployment Benefits

.GoV Told Us More People Getting Unemployment Benefits Than There Are Unemployed Workers Today

How are 19.29 million workers receiving unemployment insurance when they tell us 17.75 million are unemployed?

It’s official: “data” released from the Bureau of Labor Statistics has just crossed the streams and has given birth to the Stay Puft marshmallow man jumping the shark. Alas, it also means that jobs “data” is now completely meaningless.

For all the analysis of today’s job report, is it good, is it bad, is this data series too hot, and does it mean that the Fed will soon be forced to hike, we have just one response. None of it matters.

Why? Because a simple sanity check reveals that as of this moment the jobs report no longer makes logical sense.

Consider the continuing jobless claims time series, also also referred to as “insured unemployment”, and represents the number of people who have already filed an initial claim and who have experienced a week of unemployment and then filed a continued claim to claim benefits for that week of unemployment.

By its very definition, insured unemployment is a subset of all Americans who are unemployed. In a Venn diagram, the Continuing Claims circle would fit entirely inside the “Unemployed” circle, which also includes Initial Claims, Continuing Claims, and countless other unemployed Americans who are no longer eligible for any benefits. 

Alas, as of this moment, the definitionally smaller circle is bigger than “bigger” one, and as the DOL reported today, there were 19.29 million workers receiving unemployment insurance. And yet, somehow, at the same time the BLS also represented that the total number of unemployed workers is, drumroll, 17.75 million.

If you said this makes no sense, and pointed out that the unemployment insurance number has to be smaller than the total unemployed number, then you are right. And indeed, for 50 years of data, that was precisely the case.

And yes, there is a “forced” explanation to justify how this may actually happen in the current situation where everyone is abusing jobless benefits, but in theory this should not be happening, and we fully expect that in the coming weeks, the already highly politicized BLS will quietly close this gap.

Source: ZeroHedge

Washington State Loses “Hundreds Of Millions” To ‘Appearance’ Of A Nigerian Unemployment Claims Fraud Scheme

Just when you thought the world has reached a level of peak absurdity, the Nigerian scheme makes a grand reappearance.

Washington state officials admitted losing “hundreds of millions of dollars” to an international fraud scheme, originating out of Nigeria, that robbed the state’s unemployment insurance system and could mean even longer delays for thousands of jobless workers still waiting for legitimate benefits.

As the Seattle Times reported, Suzi LeVine, commissioner of the state Employment Security Department (ESD), disclosed the staggering losses during a news conference Thursday afternoon. LeVine declined to specify how much money was stolen during the scam, which she said appears to be orchestrated out of Nigeria but she conceded that the amount was “orders of magnitude above” the $1.6 million that ESD reported losing to fraudsters in April.

While LeVine said state and law enforcement officials were working to recover as much of the stolen money as possible, she declined to say how much had been returned so far. She also said the ESD had taken “a number of steps” to prevent new fraudulent claims from being filed or paid but would not specify the steps to avoid alerting criminals.

Thursday’s disclosure helped explain the unusual surge in the number of new jobless claims filed last week in Washington, which as we showed this morning was the state with the highest weekly increase in claims.

On Wednesday, the state’s monthly employment report for April showed Washington with a seasonally adjusted unemployment rate of 15.4%, up from 5.1% in March. The national unemployment rate for April stood at 14.7%, seasonally adjusted.

For the week ending May 16, the ESD received 138,733 initial claims for unemployment insurance, a 26.8% increase over the prior week and one of the biggest weekly surges since the coronavirus crisis began. That sharp increase came as the number of initial jobless claims nationwide fell 9.2%, to 2.4 million, according to data released earlier in the day by the Labor Department.

Indeed, the surge in claims made Washington the state with the highest percentage of its civilian labor force filing unemployment claims – at 30.8%, according to an analysis by the Tax Foundation, a nonpartisan Washington, D.C., think tank. Nevada, the next-highest state, reported claims from 24.5% of its civilian workforce.

It now appears that many of those claims were fictitious and emanated from some computer in Nigeria.