Much has been said about the EDD’s failure to protect tax payer money by failing to place simple safeguards to prevent fraud. After billions of dollars were fraudulently paid to criminals (now esitmated to be as high as $9 billion), the EDD scrambled mid-pandemic to apply a third-party identity verification service called ID.me to stop the fraud. On October 1, 2020, the EDD successfully added this service to new and future claims (something it should have done years ago). However, it did not connect the ID.me service to existing claims, forcing over a million claimants to manually verify their identity through the overwhelemd and ineffectiveEDD system.
Under singnificant political pressure to clear up its backlog, the EDD did not verfiy many of the blocked claims. Instead, it bought time by ignoring many of identity documents it receiving, and kicking the case to the unemployment insurance appeals board to verify. Even after going throigh an appeal process, claimants could wait for weeks and months before their claim was finally paid.
After months of uncertainty and chaos, the EDD has finally connected existing claims to the ID.me service. This should allow claimants to quickly and safely verify their idenity. The EDD claims they would pay within 30 days of verification. We’ll continue to watch.
