The clock is ticking on getting back this massive heist of your money

House Republicans are quickly advancing legislation to recover massive taxpayer losses due to fraud.

Matt Weidinger is the Rowe Fellow in poverty studies at the American Enterprise Institute. He is a former deputy staff director of the House Committee on Ways and Means.

A hearing by the House Ways and Means Committee last month reviewed the grim results. Dubbed "the greatest theft of taxpayer dollars" in history by Chairman Jason Smith, the hearing included testimony from the Inspector General of the US Department of Labor, Larry Turner. Turner said the "low end" estimate for unemployment benefit misspending during the pandemic is currently $191 billion—including both fraud and erroneous payments. A recent GAO report conservatively estimates that losses to fraud alone total at least $60 billion. Both figures are sure to rise, and private sector experts estimate the taxpayer rip-off totals an astonishing $400 billion. 

Both state and federal benefits are paid out by state agencies. Democrats especially complain those agencies have been underfunded—and they are right. Since the 1990s, under both Republican and Democratic presidents and congressional majorities, real spending on administering unemployment benefits has fallen steadily. Those same state agencies now bear the responsibility—and expense—of recovering pandemic misspending. Yet under current rules, if states recover misspent federal funds, they must return 100 percent of what they recover to the federal government. That gives states no incentive to go after the bulk of pandemic fraud.