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Fraudulent Unemployment Claims On The Rise In Washington - Seattle, WA - The Employment Security Department is seeing a new wave of false unemployment claims, but says this time they're not going through.
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The 2021 legislative session produced a mixed bag of results for small business owners. Lawmakers attempted to solve some of the systemic problems with unemployment benefits, taxation policy and business restrictions, while simultaneously creating new, over burdensome, and in some cases, outright punitive regulations on small business.
Much of the legislation passed this session was designed to penalize small business and create new ‘rights’ for disgruntled employees to retaliate against their current, or previous employers with little regard for due process or existing case law.
House Bill 1076, referred to as the Qui-Tam bill, would have allowed anyone to bring a lawsuit against an employer for a perceived employment law violation when a state agency declines to pursue action against an employer. The enforcement action would have been applied even though the person raising the complaint may not have been affected by the alleged violation. A proportion of the proceeds of
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As the Washington Policy Center has highlighted over the last year, the Employment Security Department (ESD) has been unable to correct the fundamental issues plaguing the department. While some improvements have been made, claimants are still seeing long wait times, adjudication delays and delayed payments.
Interim Deputy Commissioner Phil Castle, who took over leadership of ESD from Commissioner Suzi Levine earlier this year, apologized in a hearing last week to legislators, who are frustrated with the departments lack of progress.
Last spring, ESD systems were overwhelmed with a significant increase in benefit claims, which allowed Nigerian scammers and other individuals to take advantage of an inadequate benefit claimant identity verification process and steal at least $650 million in benefits from the public.
Apr 14, 2021 | STATESCOOP
The amount of fraudulent unemployment insurance claims paid out by the State of Washington last year was likely far higher than the $647 million identified by state officials, and possibly as great as $1.1 billion, according to reports published Tuesday by the state auditor’s office.
In a set of four reports on the state Employment Security Division, auditors laid out a detailed accounting of the rampant fraud that afflicted Washington’s unemployment services a phenomenon seen nationally as the COVID-19 pandemic exploded and caused record-braking claims as businesses were forced to close.
One of the reports states that even before the pandemic, the ESD “lacked a robust anti-fraud unit,” a situation that was exacerbated by the high volume of claims and “looser requirements” around the federal programs that were created to support people put out of work because of the coronavirus.