Another unemployment nightmare: Floridians are told to return overpayments
The state’s Department of Economic Opportunity is trying to claw back possibly billions of dollars in nonfraudulent unemployment claims. Thousands of Floridians have received stern letters warning them that they face being sent to collections if they don’t reimburse the state.
So how many unemployment recipients, through no fault of their own, must pay back “overpaid” benefits?
The state doesn’t know.
“It’s been a constant stress for so many Floridians,” said state Rep. Anna Eskamani, D-Orlando.
The latest overpayment notices are arriving after federal unemployment benefits implemented due to the COVID-19 pandemic ended last month. The state’s jobless agency has struggled to pay timely and accurate claims for millions of Floridians. Some overpayment notices were mailed out after the deadline for recipients to appeal them. Calls to the state’s hotline go unanswered or unreturned. Appealing the letters can take months.
The overpayments are a headache for the state as well, and the Department of Economic Opportunity has suspended referring the cases to collections through the end of 2022.
“The Department recognizes the highly frustrating issues overpayments cause, and we are actively working to alleviate the challenges being experienced by claimants,” department spokesperson Emilie Oglesby said in a statement.
Just how much the state has sent in overpayments is still unknown. The Department
of Economic Opportunity has not said how many people have been overpaid, by how much, or how much it has recouped. (This year, state auditors found the department’s data was such a mess that they couldn’t verify how much the state has paid in jobless benefits during the pandemic.)
Some of the reasons for the overpayments are because of Florida’s shambolic response to the pandemic. The demand for unemployment benefits was so great that it crushed the state’s already-troubled online unemployment system. In a scramble to get payments to Floridians, the department automatically sent money out without verifying the exact dates the recipient was eligible.
Such inexactitude required recipients, months later, to go back and clarify the weeks they were eligible; if they didn’t do it in time, they might have been hit with an overpayment notice.
But changing federal guidelines requiring unemployment recipients to submit their employment records multiple times also triggered some overpayments.
When Congress extended pandemic unemployment benefits last year, it added a provision requiring states to ask recipients for employment records showing they were eligible for benefits. If recipients didn’t submit the records in time, they were told to repay the money.
Last year, Zoe Martin, 39, of DeLand, got an overpayment notice that required her to submit documents showing she had lost her job because of the pandemic. Then, two months ago, she received another notice stating she owes about $18,000 unless she resubmitted those records. Except this time, she can’t find those records.
“It’s just one hurdle after another,” she said. “Now we have to go back and feel like we’re in trouble.”
GET A NOTICE, BENEFITS MAY STOP
Overpayment notices have created other problems for recipients: Once they get one, it can block them from claiming additional benefits.
That’s what Silvania Richard, 26, of Orlando, said happened to her. She attended Valencia College for a warehouse-logistics program and did a brief internship in May. Unbeknownst to her, the internship paid her, which she said triggered an overpayment notice from the state when she claimed benefits. She said she has been unable to claim benefits since and unable to reach someone for help.
“It still says they’re waiting for adjudication from the overpayment,” Richard said.
The U.S. Department of Labor did throw a lifeline to alleviate what it called the “widespread overpayments in benefits”: it allowed recipients keep the money if the overpayment wasn’t their fault.
“Amid the pandemic, state unemployment insurance programs did the best they could in the face of unprecedented demand as millions of Americans filed claims for benefits,” Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary for Employment and Training Suzi LeVine said in May. “That demand, coupled with systems stretched beyond their capacity, led to widespread overpayments in benefits.”
As of Sep. 29, 168,862 federal waivers had been requested in Florida, and 96,314 were granted, according to the Department of Economic Opportunity. The rest were either denied or have yet to be resolved.