System for unemployment benefits exposes digital divide Follow Us
Question of the Day
By ANDREW KENNEY - Associated Press - Sunday, May 2, 2021
DENVER (AP) - As a social worker with the Denver Public Library, part of Sonia Falcón’s job is to help people in East Denver use government services and benefits. But she’s never seen anything like the unemployment case that has consumed her work since February.
“I would say at minimum 10 hours a week,” Falcón explained. “It’s been significant.”
She’s spent all those hours helping one 66-year-old library patron, an out-of-work preschool teacher, with her unemployment benefits. They are trying to navigate the labor department’s new cybersecurity system, which is designed for smartphones and requires multiple forms of current government ID. The preschool teacher has neither.
System for unemployment benefits exposes digital divide
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Colorado unemployment benefits hard to get without smartphone
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Collateral damage in a war against scammers
Until the pandemic, it was simpler to get unemployment benefits in Colorado and elsewhere. State security systems generally asked people to fill out a form with their personal information facts like their date of birth and their social security number to prove who they were. That was easy enough for many people.
But the last year has revealed that approach to be obsolete as scammers have used hordes of stolen identities to raid unemployment systems across the country, syphoning off hundreds of millions of dollars in fraudulent claims. In response, Colorado hired ID.me, which uses facial recognition to match people to their government documents, among other strategies. Other states are using other vendors and methods a necessary step, they said, to stop the bleeding.