Nearly a year after Illinois lawmakers requested a comprehensive audit of state unemployment fraud during the COVID-19 pandemic, IDES, the state agency in charge of issuing assistance, remains unable to tabulate how much money was lost to scammers.
Illinois lawmakers are calling on Gov. J.B. Pritzker and the Illinois Department of Employment Security to publish a full state audit detailing how much fraudsters stole in unemployment benefits during the COVID-19 pandemic.
The demands for transparency from the state agency in charge of dispersing pandemic unemployment assistance comes on the heels of initial audit from July 2021 revealing IDES paid out $155 million to scammers in the first seven weeks of the program’s rollout.
Nearly a year later, those lawmakers are still waiting for the full fraud report to be published with no indication from IDES when it will be released, or just how much money the state lost.
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