Copied from u/bongospank

I’d.me coverage starts about halfway

> Here’s how the scam worked for DeSantis in Florida:

Florida was making national headlines for unemployment lines blocks long with people spending all day in lin 90 degree heat just to apply, so naturally DeSantis…

… closed ALL of the unemployment offices.

They still exist, mind ypu. He just handed them over to private companies to run for profit at the taxpayers’ expense with the critical distinction that they don’t have access to anyone’s records and therefore can”t help anyone with stalled applications.

Problem solved. People stopped lining up when they realized there was no one there who could help them.

Of course, the actual number of people unemployed was still rising, so the phone lines were overrun, and the $78M website (another GOP grift for which no one has gone to prison) just stopped working entirely.

Now Florida was making national headlines ahain for a broken website that would then cost ANOTHER $70+ million, and for the fact that people wete using auto-dialers to call in thousands of times and STILL never getting thrpugh.

DeSantis needed a way to NOT process all those claims so he could cite bogus stats AND a way to spin the headlines.

Suddenly, every other story on Fox News was about unemployment fraud. Mind you, none of the stories cited any sources of publicly verifiable data, but DeSantis saw an opportunity to emerge as a hero.

He made a big splashy show of hiring more unemployment staff… except none of them were there to process claims. Instead, he filled a building in Tallahassee with agents whose sole job was to “stop fraud.”

I spoke to over a dozen of these agents (after literally THOUSANDS of phone calls) and they eventually told me among other things:

They were given quotas. If they had more than a certain number of applications in a given timeframe, then ALL of the rest were “flagged for fraud.”

Once flagged, applications would just sit on limbo forever. Applicants were never notified, and applications were never processed. Best of all, since the applications were never “verified”, DeSantis just didn’t count them as ever be ing filed.

I personally needed to speak to 13 separate individuals (which took a MONTH of auto-dialing) just to even finally be told that this “fraid hold” existed on my accpunt. And yes, that mrans the 12 people I spoke to earlier could see exactly what was holding up the application, but purposefully did not tell me instead instructing me to just wait (forever).

Turns out, NO ONE was assigned to follow up on the “fraud flag”… ever. Not on my account. Not on any account.

A sympathetic agent who was clrarly contemplating quitting literally told me there was no plan to ever remedy the mountain of “flagged” applications.

Other than human beings starving and food banks with 8 hour wait times, it was the perfect crime… except DeSantis screwed over so many (of his own) people it started making national headlines again that tens of thousands of Floridians had filed, and couldn’t get their applications processed.

He needed a way to shift the blame. Enter ID.me. if ever there was a business model DeSantis could get behind, this was it. He funnels millions in taxpayer funds to them, they shuffle some of it back into his reelectipn fund (the “DeSantis handshake”), and he gets to spin it as fighting fraud (using their bogus claims) while the headlines shift to millions of people being unable to get through to anyone or get verified on ID.me.

In my own case, FL spent a month not telling me they were now requiring me to usd ID.me, then gave me the wrong link, then sent me a broken link, then I was finally able to submit an application… which somehow dodn’t go through for months with none of my 9 separate communications ever (to this day )being answered by ID.me.

Then, when it did finally go through, it was another month and THOUSANDS more phone calls to get Florida to acknowledge the verification already submitted to them.

Total time to receive ANY of the money I put in out of my paycheck for years: 6 months of nonstop work and countless thousands of calls. I can’t imagine even a fraction of 1% of applicants would be willing to (or know how to) go through what I did… but that’s the whole point.

I don’t think some of the FL unemployment agents I spoke to even realized they were admitting to comitting federal crimes. They were just following orders handed down from DeSantis. They were very matter of fact talking about being ordered to arbitrarily mark applications as fraudulent and about the fact that no one would ever actially review those claims. They admitted these things as if they were just business as usual.

One went so far as to verofy that these tens of thousands of “pending” applications were excluded from the official calculations as if they never existed. She was clearly not a fan of DeSantis, but was surprisingly casual about admitting to wide-scale fraud.

When I finally got through to the fraud department after months, they told me they had been ordered to stop accepting emails from the other departments months ago, so even if an employee from any other department tried to do the right thing with a clearly valid application in permanent limbo, they were barred from allowing “pending” applications to ever even be reviewed.

ID.me is just one more cog in the machine of dishonest politicians wasting taxpayer money to fund their reelections and shifting blame from their intentionally crippled systems.

In case there is any doubt this is how the game is played, DeSantis himself said publicly that the FL system was intentionally set up by Rick Scott for the purpose of never paying or even counting claims so the GOP governor could make bogus statements about low unemployment numbers.