If a government agency loses $11 billion, do New York’s legislators make a sound?

That’s the question in Albany after Comptroller Tom DiNapoli issued his investigation into what was likely the most expensive administrative mishap in state history: the massive theft of unemployment insurance funds in the early days of the coronavirus pandemic.

Most news coverage has focused on DiNapoli’s estimate that New York’s UI system lost at least $11 billion to fraud between April 2020 and March 2021. It’s a slap in the face to the employers now paying back about $9 billion, plus interest, borrowed from the federal government to fund many of those bad claims. The resultant hit works out to about $200 per employee.

But the price tag isn’t the worst part of the story, which begins in 2010 when the concerns were first raised about states using outdated equipment and software to administer unemployment claims. The problems weren’t fixed, and the 2020 flood overwhelmed the Labor Department.

Read the full piece in the New York Post.