LOUISVILLE, Ky. — It’s a rare thing for Democrats and Republicans in Congress to agree on anything, even rarer when Congressman James Comer (R-Kentucky) and Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York) see eye-to-eye.
But that’s exactly what happened when it came to looking at how unemployment benefits were handled in Kentucky during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic.
“I agree with Ocasio-Cortez for once, and Kentucky’s unemployment system been a disaster too,” Rep. Comer told FOCUS after getting off his flight home from Washington, D.C. Thursday.
Wednesday, Ocasio-Cortez blasted the commonwealth during a hearing in the House Oversight Committee, which Comer now chairs.
“In Kentucky, state employees applied for unemployment benefits while still employed by the state,” Ocasio-Cortez said. “And were able to hack the state’s information management system and remove holds on their own accounts and none of these states have been put under investigation by this committee.”
Ocasio-Cortez questioned why Comer sent letters concerning widespread fraud to only New York, Pennsylvania and California.
Comer later addressed her concerns, saying “I would love to join in a joint investigation of the Kentucky unemployment system and New York unemployment system if you wanted to do that…I would love to work with you on that.”
Back in Kentucky, Comer criticized pandemic overspending on the federal and state levels and argued that Democrats did very little oversight when their party controlled the House.
“This is the first hearing in the House of Representatives to deal with fraud in the pandemic spending,” he said.
Pointing out that tens of billions of dollars, likely hundreds of billions of dollars, were lost to fraud, Comer wants accountability.
“We’re gonna request information from just about every state that we know had massive amounts of unemployment fraud, we’re gonna see if anything’s been done to prosecute people,” he said.
He expects to get the full cooperation of Kentucky and its governor’s office and Labor Cabinet.
“We’re serious about trying to identify how much was actually lost to fraud, and we’re going to try to get some of it back, at the very least hold people accountable,” Comer said. “Surely, to goodness, we can do things to prevent this from happening in the future.”
Seeking comment on the federal inquiry, Labor Cabinet spokesperson Rosalind Harvey reissued a past statement concerning the transgressions made by state employees:
Disciplinary action was taken in accordance with state personnel laws, including termination, multi-day suspensions and reprimands. Anybody who improperly collected jobless benefits was required to repay them. The administration also referred the matter to the Executive Branch Ethics Commission and all appropriate agencies for further review.
Throughout the pandemic, FOCUS reported extensively on fraud, including the massive amounts of identity thefts and cyber attacks on Kentucky's unemployment system.
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