Unemployment woes grow with false claim filings; one local employer sees more than 20
Story updated May 14 to provide new email and information to provide to ESD fraud division after it updated its website.
As the coronavirus pandemic leads to widespread unemployment, word is spreading that people’s identities are being fraudulently used to file claims for benefits.
An Associated General Contractors of Washington member bulletin sent this week stated, “AGC of Washington has received some fraudulent unemployment-benefit claims for individuals currently employed with AGC. Upon further investigation, it appears to be an issue for many companies across many industries in Washington state.”
The Seattle Times came across cases reported in King County.
A representative for Puyallup-based Absher Construction told The News Tribune on Friday it has discovered more than 20 such false claims involving its employees.
In response to questions, Employment Security Department’s communication director Clare DeLong told The News Tribune via email Friday the department was “seeing a substantial growth in the absolute number of fraud investigations.”
“That said, we are digging into the data to better understand two things: Is that growth proportional to the unprecedented growth in claims overall? And how much of the fraud flags are from actual bad actors versus the massive number of people new to the system who are making simple entry errors?” DeLong said.
DeLong added that “regardless of what we learn from that analysis, we are increasing our staff in the Special Investigations unit to address the increased demand.”
ESD commissioner Suzi LeVine has stated recently that the department has had over 1,000 percent increase in call volumes at its call centers. According to one ESD official, of the 265,000 claims in Washington state that have not been paid, 180,000 have further paperwork to complete.
Scott Michael, policy, data, performance and integrity manager for ESD, told the Rapid Response South Sound’s Covid-19 Business Info Series on Friday that the highest numbers of fraud claims the department had seen so far involved public jobs — government and school sectors.
Dennis Greenlee Jr. is general counsel for Absher. In a phone interview, he said the state’s Employment Security Department quarterly sends to employers a list of new claims applied for in prior quarter.
While “we did lay off some earlier in the period and have rehired, what alerted us was the people on this list had not been laid off,” Greenlee said.
About the same time Absher representatives discovered the claims, “employees on the list received a letter from ESD — it was a legitimate letter as far as we can tell — about self employment opportunities,” he said. “The people on our list, most didn’t understand why they were getting it and ignored and tossed it.”
Greenlee said the company’s human resources director looked into it and “went into ESD website and ... discovered pending unemployment claims filed under their name using personal data but tied to an email account unknown to the employees.”
“We’ve been trying to call (ESD) for a couple of days,” he added, but had not yet been able to get through. “They’ve got their hands full, so that’s not surprising.”
Greenlee said the false claims were discovered earlier this week and that the company’s workers were “proceeding as if we’ve all been compromised.”
False filings, left uncorrected, could affect the amount an employer pays for unemployment insurance.
Greenlee noted he’s had to become an instant expert on identity theft protection and help employees work through the issue.
“You hear about ID theft all the time, and then it happens and you realize you don’t know the first thing,” he said.
What to do if you’ve been targeted
If you discover a false claim made in your name, employees should contact the Employment Security Department’s Fraud division, 800-246-9763, or email ESDGPInternalFraud@ESD.WA.GOV.
Information to include in your email:
▪ Your full name
▪ Last 4 numbers of your Social Security number (never put your full SSN in an email)
▪ Your address
▪ Your date of birth
▪ Brief description of how you found out an imposter-fraud claim was filed using your information
Also, if a claim was filed using your information, you need to give the state permission to deny and cancel it.
DeLong said: “If there is a claim filed using their information, the Special Investigations team will take action and send a letter to the customer confirming the steps they took to correct the record.”
More details are at esd.wa.gov/unemployment/unemployment-benefits-fraud.
This story was originally published May 9, 2020 at 5:44 AM.
