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| AP |
President Biden’s nonchalance about Chinese spying, hacking and election interference is a cause for national worry — and his indifference to the Chinese threat extends even to his own White House.
Acting Secretary of Labor Julie Su’s catastrophic 2021 face-plant while serving as California’s labor secretary made China stronger, while making the world a more dangerous place for Americans and American ideals.
Yet Kamala Harris and her backers, including United Auto Workers president Shawn Fain, say they’d like Su to stay in her post after Jan. 20, despite the Senate’s refusal to confirm her nomination for 548 days and counting.
That makes her America’s longest-serving unconfirmed cabinet officer.
Su’s confirmation troubles stem from her time as California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s secretary of labor.
In that job, she ignored warnings about vulnerabilities in the state’s unemployment benefits system, claiming that tougher ID verification standards would disproportionately hurt black and brown Californians.
But her squeamishness left the system vulnerable: When COVID hit, Su lost some $32 billion to fraudsters who hacked the benefits program.
That staggering sum — about a third of all American unemployment insurance fraud losses during the pandemic — included a $20 billion federal loan intended to backstop California’s pandemic-stressed unemployment trust fund.
Multiple sources now say most of the lost money, about $26 billion, was captured by international crime gangs operating on behalf of foreign adversaries — and that taxpayer cash stolen by China’s Advanced Persistent Threat 41 and others is already being deployed against Americans and American interests.
“The staggering fraud committed against California’s EDD during the pandemic is alarming, but the real danger lies in what those stolen billions are now funding,” said Paul Eckloff, a retired US Secret Service special agent who now works to thwart fraud at LexisNexis Risk Solutions.
“Nation-states and transnational criminal groups are using this money to fuel illicit narcotics, human trafficking and activities that actively undermine our financial institutions and national security,” Eckloff told me.
“Even more alarming, these groups haven’t stopped — they’re continuing to target state programs across the country, promoting terror, crime, and undermining the rule of law,” he said. --->READ MORE HERE
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| Photo: dol.gov |
Fraud? What Fraud?
As Acting Secretary of Labor, Julie Su has a very big eraser and she just used it wipe out her own $32.6 billion dollar mistake.
While she was California’s Secretary of Labor, Su oversaw the California Employment Development Department – the EDD – which lost more than $40 billion during the pandemic to homegrown and international fraudsters.
But Su recently forgave $32.6 billion of that debt. How? Because the state owed it to her federal department.
In other words, Su did not even have to borrow from Peter to pay Paul – she just made sure she went from being Peter to being Paul.
An important note – the massive increases businesses are now paying in federal unemployment taxes to pay off a different state pile of $20 billion dollars in debt will continue. Sorry.
Another important note – this relief will not change the current woeful condition of the state’s budget. The debt that was made to vanish had been kept “off book” by the state – the single direct benefit will be to the EDD itself which may now be able to get a “clean” auditor’s report next year.
A third important note – it is currently unknown where that debt will go, federal accounting-wise. Exactly where that $32.6 billion dollar write off will end up – on what bookkeeping sheet, on the books, off the books, thrown into the national debt pile – is unclear. What is clear is that California skated on the debt, literally by saying “we tried to collect it from the fraudsters but couldn’t and now the time has run out, so there.”
The entire issue is rather convoluted, but here is what happened.
During the pandemic, the EDD sent out a few different “types” of unemployment money. The part that saw the most fraud, Su has said, was the the federal “pandemic unemployment assistance” bucket of money.
Technically, this may be true but it is a cunning dodge on Su’s part because the EDD was the single spigot through which all of the different funds flowed. For example, it was people declaring themselves “self-employed” who were no such thing that did much of the raiding of the system. This occurred because, for the first eight months or so of the pandemic, the EDD did not require a person to prove they were self-employed (say, by sending in a copy of a city business permit or some such proof.)
All one had to do was go to the EDD website, type in some names and numbers (remember Sen. Feinstein’s name was used and all of the inmates who profited?) and that was that – a pre-loaded debit card was sent to the address listed, even if it was out of state or out of country or the EDD had already sent hundreds of cards to the same address.
In other words, the EDD sent both state and fed money in a single clump, making it – and Su – ethically responsible for where it went no matter where it came from.
Su was informed by security professionals very early on in the pandemic response that fraud – on a massive scale – was occurring, but took months to staunch the flow (she later said she didn’t want to hurt potentially legitimate recipients even though she did exactly that by – for between two and eight weeks -cutting all benefits to millions overnight on New Year’s Eve, 2020. --->READ MORE HEREFollow link below to a relevant story:
Republicans accuse acting Labor Secretary Julie Su of ignoring fraud in California
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