Christopher Stolfa
9/30/10
Global History
Mr. Giambalvo
NY Uses New Weapon to fight Unemployment Fraudsters
Unemployment Fraud is a method used to collect money from the government without paying anything back. The works of Unemployment Fraud hurts our economy badly especially in these times. The State of NY Has found a new method to try to stop unemployment fraud. Hopefully NY can clear some things up and make sure this does not happen anymore.
Our Previous system was very ineffective because the number of unemployed people accepting money did not file state tax returns or they couldn’t pay off the full amount to the state. The people who this is focused on are people who owe $25 or more. The average amount of money owed was about 10 weeks of benefits. The average weekly benefit for NY is $302, so 10 weeks would turn out to be $3,020. About half of 80,000 citizens owe NY less than $500 and about a quarter of these people owe $1,000 to $5,000. New York actually has the most fraudsters, there are Currently 29,798 individuals owe $54,083,295.
This program that has been implemented will only apply for people who owed the state money for 6-10 years. All of these individuals are given 60 days to prove that they did not wrongly collect unemployment benefits; they already repaid the state or used the money in bankruptcy court. This will help detect the Frauds. Also about 1/3rd of 80,000 people still kept collected benefits while after finding jobs and being employed. All of the Fraudsters will have to pay the debts or they will receive no more benefits after being laid off.
In my opinion this article was somewhat interesting and important. I find this interesting because I enjoy reading about the things that are going on that most people won’t understand. This is also important because we are in rough times right now and we really don’t need people cheating a system that could actually be helpful to people who need it.
