Auditor Shad White appears before a U.S. House Ways & Means Subcommittee.
In a release from the State Auditor’s office on Thursday, Auditor Shad White announced that his office has been conducting a detailed investigation into unemployment compensation fraud called Operation Payback and has secured their first indictment associated with the operation.
“My office found that during COVID, Mississippi handed out over half a billion dollars in illegal unemployment compensation payments,” said White. “It’s tragic to think about what that money could have gone to instead. And much of it went to out-of-state fraudsters that we’ll never catch. But for the criminals who can be identified, we’re going to drop the hammer.”
Operation Payback is different from most other investigations in the State Auditor’s office because of a unique data analytics tool that auditors used. With advanced machine learning, auditors were able to track some of the misspent unemployment funds and identify suspicious activity.
“For example, advanced software tools combed millions of unemployment compensation payments and identified perpetrators who may have close associations,” said White. “When we dug into these, it was obvious some had conspired to defraud the system.”