The following article was originally published in the Ohio Capital Journal and published on News5Cleveland.com under a content-sharing agreement.
Kevin Williams recently received a letter from the Ohio Department of Job and Family Services saying he must pay back thousands of dollars of unemployment payments he received during the pandemic.
He received a Pandemic Unemployment Assistance (PUA) overpayment fraud letter on Jan. 16 saying he owes $22,983.
“I was panicked,” the Columbus resident said when he opened the letter. “All of a sudden I have this weird bill that comes from nowhere. And I have to pay this. I don’t have that money.”
The letter, obtained by the Capital Journal, says his PUA application is fraudulent. PUA was made for people who don’t qualify for traditional unemployment benefits and the federal PUA program ended September 2021.
“The Ohio Department of Job and Family Services has determined that you were overpaid benefits to which you are not entitled because you committed fraudulent misrepresentation,” the letter said. “The individual was issued a fact-finding questionnaire through their online PUA account so this agency could verify their identity, but the individual did not complete and return the questionnaire.”
Williams says he doesn’t remember receiving the questionnaire. And it appears as though he’s not alone. A recent Reddit thread has more than 100 comments of people sharing similar stories about receiving overpayment fraud letters.
“These letters are terrifying,” Williams said.
ODJFS paid $7.6 billion in pandemic unemployment benefits and received 2.7 million claims for PUA, focusing on the claims that were “most likely to be legitimate,” ODJFS Public Information Officer Tom Betti said in an email.
However, the department later identified millions of those dollars that they say were dispersed as fraud.
“Recently, we began adjudicating the remaining 180,000 claims initially flagged as having a high likelihood of fraud,” Betti said in an email. “While most of these are likely fraud, some may be legitimate claimants. We apologize for any inconvenience and encourage legitimate claimants to work through the appeal process and submit the required documents.”
He said ODJFS recently sent letters to PUA recipients that “lacked the proper identification documents in their accounts and were flagged as fraud.”
ODJFS identified $6.9 billion in fraud and non-fraud overpayment — including $4.8 billion in non-fraud PUA overpayments and $1 billion in fraudulent PUA overpayments, as of Sept. 30, according to the department.
The Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security (CARES) Act tacks on a penalty of at least 15% to “benefit amounts fraudulently obtained,” according to the letter. That penalty adds $2,763 to the total amount Williams owes.
“A variety of new safeguards are in place to prevent fraudulent unemployment claims and ODJFS continues to work with law enforcement to help facilitate the recovery of funds and hold scammers accountable under the law,” Betti said in an email.
Pandemic unemployment
Williams was self-employed and working as a rideshare driver when the COVID-19 pandemic hit, so he signed up and was initially approved for PUA. He received regular payments from March 21, 2020, to September 19, 2020.
He says he got a letter from ODJFS in 2021 — months after he stopped collecting money — saying the department had miscalculated his income and had been overpaying him. So he said he submitted the overpayment waiver but never heard back until now.
“This must be an overpayment waiver that I filed years ago they’re finally just now getting to,” he remembers thinking when he got the Jan. 16 letter. “Instead, it moves to notices that they found instances of fraud on my account.”
ODJFS says people can appeal these fraud claims through the online portal, but Williams said he hasn’t tried that yet. Instead, he talked to a lawyer who said they can fight this for him, but Williams realizes not everyone is in a position where they can do that.
“I am thankful that I’m in a position to be able to pay to do that,” he said. “But I know a lot of people aren’t.”
News 5 has been covering this issue since 2021. Watch our previous reporting here:
