Getting a job with the District of Columbia does not mean you have to give up your unemployment checks, a new investigation found.
The DC Department of Employment Services, or DC DOES, cannot show it has done much to ensure city employees stop collecting unemployment insurance payments once they get hired, according to a report issued Tuesday by the Department of Labor’s inspector general.
DC DOES is responsible for preventing unemployment fraud in the city. Since 2011, there have been repeated allegations of fraudulent activities at DC DOES, including creating false claims and providing unemployment benefits for relatives.
Many of those allegations have been confirmed by inspectors general for the city and the Labor Department, both of which have issued a series of recommendations to prevent improper payments.
Yet DC DOES has not implemented the recommendations to prevent fraud by city employees and cannot guarantee they are not double-dipping, according to the DOL IG.
“DC DOES could not demonstrate that it took action on those employees who were found to be simultaneously working and receiving UI benefits,” the DOL-IG report says. “As a result, DC DOES cannot ensure that improperly paid UI benefits to these DC government employees were recovered.”
In 2013, DC DOES implemented a process to identify all city employees receiving unemployment benefits. But city officials say they cannot always stop the unemployment checks on time.
Instead, they do subsequent reviews and stop improper payments, then try to recover money that should not have been paid.
DC DOES developed a computer monitoring system that cross-matches city employees with unemployment lists, called a “watch dog report.” As of December 2013, there were 66 city employees collecting unemployment insurance benefits.
Yet the city had no documentation to show it had taken action against any of them.
“DC DOES could not provide any documentation to support actions taken on claimants identified in the ‘watch dog’ reports,” the DOL-IG report says. “As a result, these people could still be improperly receiving UI benefits.”
The IG also found DC DOES could not even prove it was collecting money from employees identified in a 2012 fraud investigation as collecting both paychecks and unemployment.
