ANNAPOLIS - Maryland paid $46 million in unemployment insurance benefits to people ineligible for the assistance in fiscal 2010, state officials said Tuesday.
The payouts represent roughly 5 percent of the state's total unemployment insurance payments in fiscal 2010 -- which is a 25 percent increase from last year.
"In order to have a strong unemployment trust fund, we need to make sure that we pay benefits properly," said Julie Squire, assistant secretary of unemployment insurance for the Department of Labor, Licensing and Regulation.
She said DLLR identifies overpayments by scanning national and state employment databases to flag newly hired workers who are continuing to collect benefits.
"We know, anecdotally, pretty much all [ineligible recipients] are people who are going back to work and continuing to file for unemployment insurance -- that's probably 90 percent of it," Squire told the state-appointed Committee on Unemployment Insurance Oversight.
The agency is ramping up efforts to reclaim the overpayments, she added. DLLR orders paybacks by mail and in some cases will intercept tax returns to acquire the money.
"There's no way we will ever catch everyone," Squire said. She emphasized that the waste remains below the 11 percent national average in improper unemployment checks.
Last year, DLLR sent out $35 million in payments to ineligible recipients.
She told state Sen. Thomas Middleton, chairman of the committee, that the agency does not have a goal for cutting the payments to ineligible residents.
Squire also reported that Maryland employers will continue paying the highest possible contribution rates to the unemployment insurance trust fund in fiscal 2011 to meet a growing demand for benefits. The state paid out roughly $50 million more in benefits in fiscal 2010 than fiscal 2009.
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6 comments:
They're called the Democrat base !
Thats funny. I was denied
It's called there is no check and balance for any unemployment. These people are allowed to stay on it and mooch it for as long as they want. They are supposed to be applying to 2 jobs a week. I bet 95% don't and that's a requirement. Unemployment is a joke.
You gotta laugh at this when you consider that the process for filing for new benefits over internet gives you the option of doing the entire thing in Spanish.
1:07 PM
The only thing you said that was true was they are required to make two job searches a week.
Try to place a call to those incompetent state workers. On hold for an hour and eleven minutes, transferred to three different departments and disconnected when they could not give me an answer to a simple question. More like they did not want to give me an answer. The Feds extended benefits last spring and MD doesn't want to honor the law. I was able to work my second job all summer and I am lucky I kept that job all these years. Still unemployed but now I don't even want to get involved with the state. I will figure out ways to get by on my own or with help from family and friends. In my experience, unemployment in Maryland is not for everyone if you get my meaning, isn't that right, 12:04 pm?
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