A real reporter tackles a story, competently. As it is supposed to be.

Well, the article is almost book-length, but here are some highlights:

Internal Documents Reveal the Story Behind California’s Unemployment Crash
CalMatters | November 7, 2023 | Lauren Helper

By the first COVID summer, no one knew who was who. In Nigeria, an oil company IT engineer was allegedly filing for unemployment in California and 16 other states with a slew of fake Gmail accounts. At a desert state prison in Imperial County, an inmate used personal data bought on the dark web to funnel unemployment money to his wife for a $71,000 Audi and a down payment on a house. Along the Pacific coast in Carlsbad, Danny Ramos was one of millions of real California workers realizing that something was going very wrong, as weeks or months went by without the unemployment benefits they badly needed.

“It felt,” Ramos said, “like this was just a big old scam.”

As California unemployment claims spiked 2,300% in the early months of 2020, the state’s top labor officials ricocheted from crisis to crisis, internal communications obtained by CalMatters show. Emails and emergency meeting notes detail how the long-troubled California Employment Development Department became the focal point — and then the punching bag — for state efforts to stave off economic collapse while contending with a historic wave of fraud.

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“It’s almost like a pendulum, where EDD has opened up the door, and fraud’s happening,” former California Auditor Elaine Howle told CalMatters this summer. “And then, ‘Oops, oh my God, there’s fraud. Let’s freeze all these accounts.’”

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“The best way I can describe it,” Williams said, “is like going to a gunfight with a squirt gun.” 

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In May 2020, California rolled out the unprecedented federal Pandemic Unemployment Assistance program for self-employed workers, which the EDD later blamed for 95% of the state’s COVID-era fraud.

“No,” state websites instructed applicants for the new federal program. “You do not need to submit any documents to the EDD.”

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About 60% of claims — including many later suspected to be fraud — sailed through an automated application process, a state EDD task force appointed by Newsom found. The application for the emergency federal program for self-employed workers was particularly fast and easy to game, state audits and district attorneys found (sample successful applicant: “Poopy Britches”). 

The other 40% of unemployment claims were flagged for manual review for a wide range of reasons, the task force found: typos, nicknames, language barriers, mismatched dates, hyphenated last names, middle initials instead of full middle names, addresses “too long to fit in the database” used by the EDD and so on. 

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Things between the EDD and payment contractor Bank of America, meanwhile, were tense. The state and the bank sparred in the early days of the pandemic over how many benefit debit cards it was physically possible to print and provide customer service for.

“They are telling us their limit to issue new cards is 22,500 per night,” EDD Director Hilliard wrote on March 26, 2020. “Starting this Sunday we expect about 465,000 new claimants that will need a card.”

Su was adamant that the bank do more, replying, “We want NO DELAYS in payment of benefits.”