# Unemployment fraud and overpayment figures, by what they measure

The official figures this archive can document for fraud, improper payments and overpayments in the pandemic unemployment programs, one row per figure: 32 figures from 11 documents, each with the issuer's own term for what it counts, the amount exactly as printed, the period, and the words in the document that carry it.

Published at https://pandemicdarlings.com/data/ui-fraud-estimates/ . Compiled table; not part of release pandemic-darlings-data-v1-2026-07-10. Built 2026-09-23.

## Files

| file | rows | bytes | sha256 |
|---|---|---|---|
| `ui-fraud-estimates.csv` | 32 | 27,173 | `a5051a3f6d8a6a4eda0ee83bdd748fa635911bd65596b624c504ff868f90d9fe` |
| `definition-classes.csv` | 11 | 2,161 | `45c15825278b9f78a5be651ad9fbae7c77a568eba7fedf3aa2f0af8877cb160f` |

`dictionary.csv` beside this file describes every column: measured type, blanks, distinct values, range, example and meaning. `SHA256SUMS` carries the SHA-256 of every file in the folder.

## What this is

One row is one figure as one document prints it: the Government Accountability Office's statistical estimate of fraud, the Labor Department inspector general's improper-payment and potential-fraud figures, the Labor Department's own improper payment rates, the overpayments states established and recovered, and the inspector general's counts of people charged and convicted. Each row carries a definition class, derived from the documents themselves, that says what kind of quantity the figure is; `definition-classes.csv` defines each of the 11 classes.

The method is the one used for the site's table of pandemic fraud estimates across all programs, applied to unemployment insurance and extended to figures that table does not hold. Six of these rows repeat figures that table already carries (GAO-23-106696 and the inspector general's $191 billion, $163 billion, $45.6 billion, $30.4 billion and $9.9 billion).

## How it was built

Figures were copied from the documents. `amount_as_printed` keeps the document's string; `amount_low` and `amount_high` hold it as a number for sorting, with `unit` saying whether that number is dollars, people or a percentage. Every verbatim span was found again in the document file when the table was built (32 of 32), with whitespace collapsed and typographic ligatures folded, and pinned to its PDF page. The SHA-256 of each file is in the row.

The Labor Department's improper payment rates come from PaymentAccuracy.gov, the federal government's improper payments site, which draws them as a chart; the rows quote the value in the page's chart data and the outlays sentence printed beside it.

## Before you quote a row

**Do not add the rows.** They sit in 11 classes and several overlap: the $9.9 billion is part of the $30.4 billion, the $16 billion is part of the $45.6 billion, and the established, recovered and waived amounts are pieces of the same overpayments. Adding across rows produces a number no issuer published.

**Improper payment is not fraud.** The inspector general's "at least $191 billion" applies the Labor Department's 21.52 percent improper payment rate to about $888 billion in pandemic unemployment spending; improper payments include error and ineligibility as well as fraud, and the inspector general says only that "a significant portion" was fraud.

**Only one row estimates fraud itself.** GAO's range of $100 billion to $135 billion, for April 2020 through May 2023, is the only statistical estimate of the amount of fraud in the table.

**Potential fraud is flagged, not found.** The $5.4 billion, $16 billion and $45.6 billion are payments to Social Security numbers the inspector general's data matching flagged in four high-risk areas: filed in multiple states, belonging to deceased people, belonging to federal prisoners, or used with suspicious email accounts.

**The published rates leave PUA out.** PaymentAccuracy.gov lists the programs in the Labor Department's monetary-loss calculation as "traditional state UI, UCFE, UCX, EB, EUC08 benefits, and PEUC and FPUC CARES Act benefits". The 35.9 percent PUA rate comes from a separate Employment and Training Administration review, as the inspector general reports it; that review, the inspector general says, "was not designed to produce a statistically valid rate for individual states".

**Established overpayments are determinations, and far below the estimates.** States reported $36.9 billion established in PUA, PEUC and FPUC through September 30, 2022; the inspector general estimated $118.1 billion should have been.

**Counts of people are for a stated window.** The 512 charged and 531 convicted are the Labor Department inspector general's figures for August 2022 through December 31, 2023, reported in the Justice Department task force's 2024 report. They are not totals since 2020.

**Each row is fixed to its document's date.** Later documents restate or revise figures; where a document restates an earlier figure, the row says so.

## What it does not measure

No row is a finding by this archive, and the table draws no conclusion about the true amount of fraud. It covers only figures in documents the archive can show. Claims made in public without a published method are not included.

## Citation

Unemployment fraud and overpayment figures, by what they measure, compiled from GAO, U.S. Department of Labor, Department of Labor Office of Inspector General and Justice Department documents dated 2021-02-22 to 2026-05-18, and PaymentAccuracy.gov retrieved 2026-09-23.

## Rights

Compiled from U.S. government public records; attribution to Pandemic Darlings requested for the compiled table.