Four Nevada men recently pleaded guilty to fraud after scamming the state out of more than $4 million in unemployment benefits. The scammers would promise unsuspecting, unemployed Nevadans help applying for benefits but then kept portions, or sometimes all of the money the state paid out, for themselves.
Massive fraud cases like this one are rare, but all over the country, state agencies have paid out about $20 billion in improper unemployment payments during the last three years. Now there is a national push to reign in those illegitimate payments.
Part of the problem, according to Steve Zuelke of the Nevada Department of Employment Training and Rehabilitation, is that many people who have applied for unemployment benefits are ineligible. Many are undocumented immigrants or people who’ve made up fake Social Security numbers.
In order to remedy that problem, he says, the department is now beginning to run Social Security background checks. But, it’s clear that there’s still much to be done in the way of securing the funds to make sure the government doesn’t overpay.
“The case we’re referring to is the exception, not the rule,” he says. “The typical unemployment insurance fraud is a person who returns to work and continues to collect unemployment."
Working more closely to collect data from employers, he says, could help remedy that problem.
Heather Anderson-Fintak, Senior Attorney, Nevada Legal Services, says “the problem is, any time you’re going to put new safeguards in, you’re going to have a certain amount of delay.” And that delay can create financial strain for out-of-work Nevadans.
Anderson-Fintak points to language barriers as another reason why fraud sometimes occurs. Often, she says, it’s simply a mistake, or the fact that someone misunderstood their entitlements.
“We’ve seen problems where sometimes it’s agency error and the individual claimant might not be aware,” she says. Intent isn’t always malicious.
Part of the problem, according to Zuelke, is that his department fielded more than 1 million calls last year, but has fewer than 500 employees. There aren’t a ton on resources going to unemployment, he says.
Many people complain that they can’t get through to the department to ask questions, Anderson-Fintak says. “If you can’t get through to talk with somebody” you won’t be able to solve your problem, she says.
About 25-40 percent of the time, Zuelke says, his department is able to recover the money it overpaid.
While $4 million is a lot of money for the state to lose, it’s not a huge percentage of the total monies doled out by the state for unemployment. Last year, Nevada gave out about $5 billion in unemployment benefits.
Have you been in the middle of a benefits dispute? What do you think Nevada should do to get benefits to those who are entitled to them, but keep more scams from happening?
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GUESTS
Jude Joffe-Block, reporter, Fronteras
Maurice Emsellem, policy co-director, National Employment Law Project
Steve Zuelke , Nevada Department of Employment Training and Rehabilitation
Heather Anderson-Fintak, Senior Attorney, Nevada Legal Services
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Fronteras: Four Nevada Men Await Sentencing in $4.4 Million Unemployment Fraud Scheme
By Jude Joffe-Block
LAS VEGAS — Earlier this winter, four men pleaded guilty of defrauding the state of Nevada in a massive unemployment benefits scam. Their scheme involved collecting benefits for hundreds of workers, many of whom were unauthorized immigrants.
Their case is coming to light at the same time the federal government is pushing for state agencies to crack down on improper payments of unemployment benefits, most of which are due to error rather than outright fraud or organized crime.
The fraud case in Nevada was dubbed the “Silver Stampede” by investigators.
“This is a $4.4-million case,” said Paul Camacho, the Las Vegas special agent in charge at the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). “It’s a lot of money. It’s certainly a lot of money to those in the community that are struggling, trying to survive and trying to find work.”
According to the indictment and the guilty pleas signed by defendants Francisco Garcia, Eloy Garcia, Efrain Garcia and Nabor Garcia, the men promised to help hundreds of people who were out of work apply for unemployment benefits. But then the defendants made sure those unemployment payments went to mailboxes they controlled - and they kept the money for themselves.
“The greed that drove them to commit this fraud actually turned on them by creating a money paper trial,” said Camacho, whose team helped investigate the case, along with the Department of Labor's Office of Inspector General and several other federal and state agencies.
Investigators found that over the course of two years, defendants collected unemployment benefits for almost 600 different people. The defendants pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit mail fraud, money laundering, and in one case, false representation of a social security number. They will be sentenced in January.
There was an additional aspect to the scam: Many of the claimants the defendants recruited were unauthorized immigrants; they were never eligible to collect those benefits in the first place. One reason the scheme initially worked was because the defendants filed the unemployment claims by phone or online, and the agency didn’t require proof of citizenship.
“When they were filing these claims, they weren't telling us these people were undocumented,” said Steve Zuelke of Nevada’s Department of Employment, Training and Rehabilitation. “They were stating they were citizens of the United States.”
The unauthorized immigrants likely had fake social security numbers that allowed them to work and apply for benefits.
“At the time that this was occurring we were a little more beholden to a process that we subsequently determined was less than - less than 100 percent accurate,” Zuelke said.
Now the Nevada system has tightened up. Staff will begin cross-checking applications with the social security administration and require more face to face appointments.
But the case raises the question of just how common this kind of unemployment fraud is.
“Oh, it is definitely not par for the course,” said Jane Oates, the assistant secretary for employment and training at the Department of Labor. “I mean that size, and that organized an effort, is definitely rare.”
But Oates says some unemployment payments do end up in the wrong place.
“Well, I think it will probably be a shocking number to most listeners,” Oates said. “The current rate 11 percent, actually means that we are paying twenty billion dollars in improper payments.”
That’s $20 billion paid out over the last three years. Those improper payments can occur when an employer disputes a former employee’s unemployment claim weeks after the state has begun making payments to that former employee, or when a claimant keeps collecting unemployment even after they start working again.
“We think that a lot of this we can drive down just by clearer information given to claimants,” Oates said. “We think that many people have no idea that they have been doing anything wrong.”
Steve Zuelke at the Nevada Department of Employment, Training and Rehabilitation shares the same goals, and his office is launching their own efforts to educate the public about improper payments.
But he also says when it comes to his agency tightening up requirements for unemployment benefits, there is a trade-off between complete accuracy and helping people as quickly as possible.
“We could force every individual who files a claim for unemployment benefits to jump through 7,000 hoops and climb 14 ladders in order to receive a week’s benefit,” Zuelke said. “That would become counterproductive and would defeat the purpose of the program.”
And that purpose is to make sure the millions of Americans who have been laid off get the help they need to pay their rent, pay their bills and buy groceries.
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