text:  Of course, doing all of this requires spending more taxpayer money to try to recover some of the taxpayer money that's already gone. And ultimately, we're just scratching the surface. State-level unemployment programs, which were backed up by an explicit promise from the federal government to cover their costs during the pandemic, they were a particularly big target for scammers. In a report published last year, the Government Accountability Office found substantial levels of fraud in the pandemic-era unemployment programs.