The Labor Department’s weekly reports on unemployment claims are relying on “inappropriate” methods and has “improperly presented” data on the number of claimants as a result, according to a report by the Government Accountability Office, The Hill reported. In normal times, DOL uses the number of initial jobless claims that states report each week to estimate the total number of overall claimants in a given week. But since the pandemic upended the U.S. economy, that method has led to an inaccurate tally, which is likely overstating the number of people collecting unemployment insurance. “[B]ecause backlogs in processing a historic volume of claims have led to individuals claiming multiple weeks of benefits at a time for previous weeks of unemployment, as well as other data issues, these traditional estimates have not been appropriate in the context of the pandemic,” GAO found. In other words, if a single person submits multiple claims over the course of a reporting period — something that would be rare in normal times — the DOL’s methods would count each claim as a separate individual claimant. A claimant jumping from one program to another in a piecemeal system could get counted multiple times.
