As Some Jobless Wait Months for Unemployment Benefits, Fraudsters Getting Paid

RALEIGH – Imagine your frustration when, after losing your job due to the governor’s Pandemic Panic mandates — having lead a productive life, paying your taxes, and taking care of your responsibilities — your filed claim is not processed for months.

Now, imagine that while you were waiting, struggling, languishing in need of the very safety net that your taxes fund, fraudsters with stolen identities are getting checks in the mail. That’d be pretty infuriating, right? How about if the bureaucracy of in charge of processing and distributing such checks, is so inefficient and ineffective, that they don’t even stamp out fraudulent claims when they are TOLD they are fraudulent.

That appears to be happening when it comes to the unemployment system in North Carolina; perhaps the worst performing such bureaucracy in the country.

From ABC11:

“[…] Raleigh resident Robert Skinner got a check for $5,510 from the state for unemployment benefits.

“I’ve been self-employed for the last thirty years, and I’m doing as well as I’ve ever done,” Skinner said. “You know I feel badly for the people that aren’t, but I’m, I’m fortunate in that in my business, I’m still doing very well.”

While the check is made out to Skinner, the check’s address is for the lot next door. With Skinner busy working full time, and his husband, Chapman Williams retired, Williams called the State’s Division of Employment Security to report the fraud. Williams said the first representative he got was not helpful.

“She argued with me that he did apply for it because we have a case number. And I said, Well, he did not apply he’s still working and has never filed, and she argued with me this morning for like 20 minutes,” Williams said.

Williams said he called several more times but was on hold for hours trying to reach someone in the fraud department. He said he finally got a helpful representative who couldn’t do anything about the fraud but did tell him the scammer that filed the claim used Skinner’s social security number but used a different address, and a different birth date than Skinner’s to file the claim.

Williams said he was told someone in the fraud department would get back to them, but it never happened.

“One hand didn’t seem to know what the other hand was doing.”

Meanwhile, Skinner was worried the state was still sending money to the scammer. […]”

Around a million people filed unemployment claims in the weeks following the announcement of Governor Roy Cooper’s mandated recession. Some of them are STILL WAITING. Others may be completely bogus, and collecting checks while the state government bureaucracy doesn’t even care enough to stop fraud when it’s put right in front of their faces.

In participating in the Pandemic Panic, Governor Roy Cooper has assigned himself responsibilities — of micromanaging our lives, keeping us from church, arbitrarily ruining select businesses, and mandating masks on adults and children alike — but when it comes to a executive branch bureaucracy that he is actually responsible for? An afterthought, pushed to the back burner, in favor of scoring Woke points and scolding citizens as if he were their father.