Joe Biden will nominate Deputy Secretary of Labor Julie Su to replace Marty Walsh as secretary of the Department of Labor, according to a statement from the White House.
“It is my honor to nominate Julie Su to be our country’s next Secretary of Labor,” Biden said in a statement. “Julie has spent her life fighting to make sure that everyone has a fair shot, that no community is overlooked, and that no worker is left behind. Over several decades, Julie has led the largest state labor department in the nation, cracked down on wage theft, fought to protect trafficked workers, increased the minimum wage, created good-paying, high-quality jobs, and established and enforced workplace safety standards.”
I guess Joe forgot the most important part; Julie Su served as California’s labor secretary during the time that more than $32 billion in Covid unemployment fraud occurred.
Why was it so easy to bilk the taxpayers of this extraordinary amount of money? Secretary Su put in absolutely no safeguards, nor was there any routine double-checking to ensure that identifications were legitimate.
Related: The Legacy of Pandemic Emergency Relief Programs: Biggest Scam in U.S. History
An investigation by Lexis Nexis Risk Solutions showed the laxity of the California Employment Development Department (EDD) was an eye-opener.
On Monday morning, we interviewed Haywood Talcove, the CEO of Lexis Nexis Risk Solutions, Government Division. He had checked the “dark web” for examples of fraud against EDD. He opened a laptop, pulled up a video file and hit play. The video showed a computer screen with an EDD login page along with a phone dialed to EDD’s customer line.
“You should get your card in three to five business days,” the woman on the phone says.
“This is one of my favorites,” Talcove said, pointing out that the woman is an EDD operator telling a scam artist that their EDD debit card – obtained using a stolen identity – would be sent.
The video is proof of performance that many bad actors and criminal syndicates require to show that the system they have developed works and that it is worth the time and effort.
Su was responsible for creating the system that shoveled $170 billion out the EDD door, 20% of which was intercepted by criminals. It’s the biggest fraud in California’s history and was entirely preventable.
During her nomination hearing for deputy labor secretary, Su excused her malfeasance by claiming that fraud was occurring across the country.
“We did not waive any fraud checks at the time, there was no finding that that decision led to the massive frauds,” Su said before [Sen. Richard] Burr interrupted, asking if she “didn’t waive any certifications.”
“We did not waive certifications. What we did was we saw that individuals were coming into the system to certify every two weeks and this was threatening the stability of the system itself,” answered Su. “What we said was that there was a period of time in which people, especially because of the pandemic, it was very unlikely that people would be going back to work, that, if they went back to work and were no longer eligible, they had to come and inform us of that separately but not through the system that was supporting the entire UI.”
California prison inmates stole a billion dollars in unemployment claims while supposedly being watched by prison guards. So Biden now wants to make the architect of that system a member of his cabinet.
It appears that Su will give Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg a run for his money at being the dumbest, most incompetent member of Biden’s cabinet.
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