Protecting Taxpayers and Victims of Unemployment Fraud Act

Floor Speech

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Mr. CAREY. Mr. Speaker, I rise in support of H.R. 1163.

Our jobs recovery has been hampered by bloated COVID relief benefits that paid people more not to work, while criminals and fraudsters were lining their pockets with billions in taxpayer funds from expanded UI programs.

We are not talking about everyday fraud or administrative error. We are talking about fraud that was committed with intent, both domestically and by foreign nation-state actors that, frankly, used COVID relief to conduct economic warfare against American citizens and put our national security at risk.

In my home State of Ohio, it was estimated that $1 billion may have been paid in fraudulent unemployment from March of 2020 to June of 2022.

Now, my friends on the other side are arguing against this bill and the administration has just released a Statement of Administration Policy opposing this bill.

The fact is, the President's Fiscal Year 2024 budget request includes several of the very same fraud recovery and prevention measures that my colleagues across the aisle are railing against today. Three of the proposals in the President's budget are nearly identical:

Allowing States to keep 5 percent of recovered overpayments and reinvest those dollars in program integrity and fraud prevention;

Matching unemployment claims data against the National Directory of New Hires to verify when somebody that is receiving unemployment becomes employed; and

Extending the statute of limitations for criminal charges and civil actions for prosecuting fraud from 5 to 10 years.

After declaring that ``the watchdogs are back'' in his first State of the Union, it has taken the President nearly 2 years to finally embrace the antifraud policies that we Republicans are calling for today.

Were the President to veto this bill, he would be vetoing the very same policies he endorsed.

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