March 15, 2010 11:45 PM UTC

Colorado Unemployment Insurance gotchas

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• by: richardmyers

I’ve been laid off from work twice in the past 40 years, and both times i applied for, and received unemployment insurance. There are certain requirements, i.e., make job contacts, and confirm during each two week period that you are eligible for those two weeks of pay.

I’ve discovered two bureaucratic hurdles that probably routinely deprive unemployed workers of funds which, by law, should rightfully be theirs.

In the first instance (some years ago, when i was confirming by telephone), i was stung by violating a rule which, the UI administrators admitted, was not communicated to me: payments are not made if you confirm eligibility even a few minutes late for any particular period. (Under the circumstances, i was late for two periods.)

I went through an appeals process in an attempt to get the payments for the period that i’d missed. I thought that i had grounds for success: (1) a family member, dependent upon me, was in the hospital for a serious operation; and, (2) the Department of Labor staff admitted they did not send a supposedly required notification that i had failed to apply on time for the first of those two payment periods. The judge thought i had a good argument based on (2), but assured me that it didn’t matter whether someone had died, i still needed to confirm eligibility on time. My appeal was denied.

Well, that is perhaps understandable, but what about this second example?

Using the Colorado Department of Labor’s web based system to confirm eligibility, i’ve just discovered another (apparently unwritten, or at least very obscure) rule: your Colorado Unemployment Insurance account is closed if you confirm eligibility even a few minutes early.

In practice, this means you’re applying for the first week’s eligibility of the two week period during the first week that the computer system allows you to do so, and the Department of Labor computer assumes not only that you are not eligible for the second week, but that you won’t be making any additional claims. There is no notification that your Colorado Unemployment Insurance account is closed, you simply discover that for some mysterious reason, you can no longer apply.

Fortunately the folks at the workforce center are aware of this problem, and they have a method of automatically notifying the Colorado Department of Labor when an account is accidentally rendered inoperative by an early confirmation. They told me that this happens frequently to workers collecting unemployment insurance.

At best there is a significant delay in payments, and at worst (and i expect, the most probable scenario) the claimant loses all the payments for the several weeks that it takes to straighten out the problem.

These are apparently very common problems that could easily be solved with an improved computer interface, if someone would just act on the problem. Unfortunately, the only incentive government appears to have relating to such issues is the ability to save money by not fixing the problem.

I have been told that i’ll be contacted by the Colorado Department of Labor to re-establish my account. I plan to complain (as many others undoubtedly have) about their system using such a deceptive process to close unemployment insurance accounts. I’ll be interested to see whether they are responsive, and i’ll report the results here.