The District’s unemployment compensation office does not provide its employees with basic training, opening the door for fraud and causing long waits for payments, a D.C. inspector general’s report concluded. The District paid about $157 million in unemployment claims last year, Department of Labor statistics show. Nearly $10 million went out the door in overpayments. If the city is in line with the national average, half of that $10 million was based on fraudulent claims. However, the District is the only jurisdiction in the region, and possibly the country, that doesn’t have written policies on how unemployment claims examiners should disburse funds, D.C. Inspector General Charles Willoughby wrote in his report.
“The lack of standardized processes and practices increases the potential for fraud, waste and abuse in the District’s unemployment insurance benefit program,” the report says.
Calls to the Department of Employment Services, which oversees the unemployment compensation office, were not returned Thursday.
The report found that the compensation office was overwhelmed in 2009 when unemployment in the District reached a record 12 percent with 40,000 residents out of work, up from 18,000 the year before. Unemployment is now slightly less than 10 percent.
The city was ranked 12th among all jurisdictions in the country in 2007 when it came to making timely payments. But it dropped to 48th in 2009 when unemployment spiked, the report found.
The likely problem was that claim examiners had no written policy to follow, the report said.
“Not having a manual for guidance, employees process claims inconsistently and this may create a backlog of work in completing cases,” Willoughby wrote.
The department told Willoughby the written policies are now in their “final stages.”
At-large Councilman Michael Brown, who heads the council’s committee on housing and work force, told The Washington Examiner on Thursday that the issues highlighted by Willoughby’s report will be raised during a Department of Employment Services hearing on Friday.
“District residents who have lost their jobs are often left living paycheck to paycheck and they rely on timely payments to pay their rent and buy food,” Brown said. “Some initial steps have been taken to improve the system, but additional procedures and safeguards are still necessary. We will clearly focus on this during our performance oversight hearing of DOES.”
