The Texas Workforce Commission (TWC) has flagged over 776,000 unemployment claims as suspicious or fraudulent during the pandemic. This number represents 15% of all the unemployment insurance claims submitted from the beginning of the pandemic to January 2022.
The agency is reaching out to anyone flagged for review, which has caused them to employ an additional 200 people for this sole purpose, The Dallas Morning News writes.
Any claim deemed suspicious by the TWC is put on hold, preventing the claimant from receiving benefits. The commission will then have to confirm with an employer that the fraud is occurring.
“No amount of fraud should be acceptable,” states Bryan Daniel, the TWC Chairman.
The Texas Workforce Commission has reportedly flagged billions of dollars connected to fraudulent claims throughout the pandemic. Estimates show that of the $60 billion in pandemic unemployment aid paid via the State of Texas, around 5%, or $2.53 billion, has been investigated for fraud.
In April of 2021, only $700 million worth of claims were under review, but the number had jumped to over $2.5 billion by November.
However, a new lawsuit has placed the Texas Workforce Commission under scrutiny for allegedly wrongly accusing many people of unemployment fraud. As first reported by the Houston Chronicle, the Texas Association for the Rights of the Unemployed has led a suit against the TWC, accusing them of “sending threatening letters requiring repayment.”
In the suit, plaintiffs argue that the TWC is wrong for demanding repayment without due process. They fear that the commission could be taking advantage of people by incorrectly labeling claims as fraudulent.
“TWC cut my benefits off without notice and still has not explained why. Now they’re demanding that I pay them back thousands of dollars in benefits that I can’t afford. To make it worse, I’ve been waiting on an appeal for over a year with no end in sight,” wrote Kim Hartman, president of the Texas Association for the Rights of the Unemployed and an individual plaintiff in the lawsuit. Plaintiffs in the case testified that the appeal process has been lengthy.