The chairs of the state legislature’s labor committee are trying to halt the state Department of Unemployment Assistance from collecting on overpaid unemployment benefits.
DUA overpaid at least $2.7 billion on more than 719,000 unemployment claims in 2020 and 2021, according to an analysis of state filings with the U.S. Labor Department. That assessment was conducted by Rory MacAneney, an attorney with free legal aid provider Community Legal Aid.
Sen. Patricia Jehlen and Rep. John Cutler addressed a letter to Labor and Workforce Development Secretary Rosalin Acosta, asking that "the Department of Unemployment Assistance pause collection for non-fault overpayments from residents until the end of July of 2022.”
The plea, sent Friday, said the pause would ensure legislators and “partners in Washington” have time to talk and see what went wrong, and find solutions to help the hundreds of thousands of residents impacted.
Jehlen said there’s a slew of reasons people could be flagged for overpayment, and she isn’t convinced all the people affected are fraudsters.
“People should not have to pay what little money they have for errors that were not their own fault,” she said. “We need a pause on collection so the department can catch up on the appeals that are pending, and we'll learn what the actual impact is.”
In the letter, Jehlen and Cutler suggested the pause include a direct notice to people in overpayment status that explains their account balance remains unchanged, but they’re under no obligation to pay until August. They pointed to the student loan payment pause put in place by the federal Department of Education during the pandemic, and the notices of that policy posted within people's student loan account portals.
The DUA said in a statement that it has dropped or waived $1.8 billion in overpayments since March 2020. It’s unclear if that amount can be subtracted from the $2.7 billion.
The Legislature also recently enacted a bill that requires the DUA to provide a detailed report of overpayment data by March 1, which Jehlen said will provide some insight. The legislators also want to figure out if recently released federal guidance can be used to request waivers for people who received the overpayments.
The DUA said it's reviewing that guidance so that it can "take advantage of new opportunities to provide claimants relief, and will apply for additional federal relief if needed." The agency said the vast majority of apparent overpayments are the result of rule changes to the federal Pandemic Unemployment Assistance program. In particular, the department said a rule change in January 2021 related to proof of employment requirements accounts for approximately $1.1 billion in overpayments.
Diana, who doesn't want to use her last name, was a freelancer working in creative technology and lost gigs at the onset of COVID-19. She received pandemic unemployment assistance from March 2020 to July 2021. By September 2021, Diana found full-time work, and she stopped filing for benefits. When she was preparing her taxes in January, she signed into the unemployment portal, where she saw a notice about her eligibility for unemployment.
“It was very vague, the wording. It basically said that I may be eligible for unemployment in another state, or I might have applied for unemployment in another state. It was really anxiety-producing to get,” she said. She thought someone had stolen her identity and filed for unemployment in her name in another state. The amount the agency wanted back? Over $40,000.
She called an unemployment assistance hotline and wasn’t able to get any answers. Diana hired an attorney who recommended she reach out to her local legislator, Sen. Pat Jehlen. Jehlen’s office was able to get her in touch with the right staffers at DUA who explained the problem: an old job out-of-state had given her a financial award for a patent she applied for. The problem is, Diana claimed that award when she filed for weekly unemployment benefits, and even included it in a previous years’ taxes. So it was an agency error, and she owes nothing at all.
“Even when it was rectified with the DUA, I had this feeling of being grateful, but I was also feeling like, Oh my God, it took so much effort, even with me having education and being able to speak English clearly, I still didn't understand most of what they were telling me,” she said.
MacAneney said that the $2.7 billion figure she calculated included people like Diana, whose cases were remedied. The outstanding overpayments, which haven’t yet been reversed or waived by the DUA, numbers around $660 million.
In her work as an attorney, MacAneney said she’d seen a lot of people who were told they were overpaid.
“And sometimes that decision was right, that they were overpaid for some reason," she said. "Sometimes the decision was not right, and we try to help people out with that."
She acknowledged that the DUA saw a massive amount of claims during the pandemic, but sometimes had to “cut corners” to help people get benefits in a timely fashion as they struggled to pay the bills.
In a January interview with GBH's Boston Public Radio, Gov. Charlie Baker said his administration is seeking ways to relieve people from the sudden debt.
“This is not the way this is supposed to work. People participated in this program based on a set of rules that changed,” Baker said.
