In its weekly report of new and existing jobless claims, the U.S. Labor Department has made “flawed estimates of the number of individuals receiving benefits each week throughout the pandemic,” the Government Accountability Office (GAO) said in a new report.
The inaccurate data fails to reflect the true extent of joblessness and has led to unemployed persons receiving smaller benefit payments than they should have, the report stated.
The inaccuracies also could hamper policymakers in creating initiatives that respond effectively to the damage left by the economic shutdown, according to the GAO.
The weekly data has included overestimates and underestimates at various times, the GAO said, and admitted it was unable to track the full extent of the mistakes.
In addition, the Pandemic Unemployment Assistance program (PUA) that pays stipends to gig workers and others not eligible for conventional unemployment insurance has underpaid recipients in most states, the GAO said.
“The majority of states have been paying [these] claimants the minimum allowable benefit instead of the amount they are eligible for based on prior earnings,” the GAO noted. It estimated that millions of people have been short-changed.
The mistakes in the PUA and conventional unemployment programs probably stem from the differing ways in which states calculate and report their jobless numbers, as well as states’ struggles to process an overwhelming number of claims quickly, the GAO report speculated.
As of 16 September, for example, California’s state unemployment office reported a backlog of almost 600,000 claims that went unprocessed for more than three weeks, delaying an accurate count of the state’s jobless to the federal labor department.
Also, the PUA has been rife with fraud, the GAO alleged.
About 9.1 million people were collecting benefits through the PUA in the week ended 7 November, compared to 6.1 million receiving payments through conventional state unemployment insurance programs, according to labor department figures.
TRENDPOST: For decades, the U.S. unemployment numbers have been inaccurate.
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