Reuters Up to 135 billion of jobless benefits paid out by U.S. states during the coronavirus pandemic may have arisen from fraudulent claims, Washington39;s top government watchdog said on Tuesday in a report suggesting the problem is much bigger than previously estimated.

Waves of fraudulent claims for unemployment insurance benefits have episodically inflated the volumes of new filings reported each week to the Labor Department by all 50 states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands, often confounding economists tracking the data for a read on the health of the job market.

But a new General Accountability Office report estimates the problem is much bigger Between 100 billion and 135 billion of the roughly 900 billion in jobless benefits payouts from April 2020 through May 2023 may have been fraudulent. At the high end, that would equal about 1 of every 7 paid in aid over that time.

The GAO39;s fraud estimate is around two times or more higher than the nearly 56 billion it said states themselves have estimated paying in either fraudulent payments or nonfraudulent overpayments between March 2020 and March 2023.

The full extent of UI fraud during the pandemic will likely never be known with certainty, the GAO report summary said.

The Labor Department disputed the magnitude of the GAO finding, saying it was based on a small sample of questionable claims under the Pandemic Unemployment Assistance program.

The PUA was established under the…