UNDATED (WSAU) Wisconsinites got almost $18-million in fraudulent unemployment benefits last year. That’s three times more than the previous year, at a time when total jobless benefits doubled due to the recession. In addition, people got another $33-million from honest mistakes – like forgetting to report wages from a part-time job. That also went up by a larger percentage than the total benefits did.
Still, the over-payments were only about two-and-a-half percent of all payouts. And the federal government thought that was so good, they asked Wisconsin officials to testify about it at a recent U-S Senate hearing. State Workforce Development Secretary Roberta Gassman said her agency doubled its fraud investigators in the last six months to just over 20. And they’ve gotten back more than half the excess payments that were both intentional and unintentional.
Also the Justice Department said over 50 people were criminally convicted of unemployment benefit fraud since 2006. Gassman told senators that her agency would support higher penalties for fraud, and letting states use five-percent of what they recover to pay for their efforts to crack down. But Maurice Emsellem of the National Employment Law Project says higher penalties would be a huge burden on those caught making honest mistakes.
