Michigan adds a legal adviser to help pursue unemployment insurance 'bad actors'
Michigan's Unemployment Insurance Agency has added a legal adviser to its leadership team and created a legal and compliance bureau in an effort to increase the integrity of the state's unemployment insurance system, the agency said Monday.
UIA Director Julia Dale named Kimberly Breitmeyer as the agency's legal adviser, responsible for all litigation and case referrals, memorandums of understanding, data-sharing agreements and contracts. Breitmeyer also will lead the UIA’s new legal and compliance bureau, which brings the agency's fraud and investigations division and the internal controls division under the bureau’s umbrella.
"We’re bringing in someone with extensive experience in overseeing investigations, interacting with the Attorney General’s office, and strengthening strategic partnerships with law enforcement to make information sharing easier and to continue to effectively pursue bad actors who steal money from Michigan’s workers and employers," Dale said in a news release.
Michigan's UIA, like other unemployment insurance agencies across the country, came under scrutiny during the COVID-19 pandemic as it struggled to handle a massive influx of claims, leaving certain claimants unable to reach a customer service representative and without benefits for months while millions of dollars in benefits were distributed to people trying to take advantage of the system.
As the guidelines and unemployment insurance programs changed throughout the pandemic, more than 1.8 million Michigan residents were later told they were overpaid and owed the money back. The agency has faced multiple lawsuits from claimants who were later told they weren't eligible for benefits and from claimants who say they have not received all the benefits they were entitled to in the pandemic, if at all.
According to the news release, Breitmeyer will establish a centralized procedure to pursue future fraud cases and propose new approaches to investigations, among other responsibilities.
To date, 116 individuals have been charged with unemployment insurance fraud, 46 have been found guilty or entered a plea, and 37 have been sentenced for their role in stealing funds, the release said.
"I look forward to reviewing our approach to investigations through a post-pandemic lens and working with an experienced team of UIA investigators to aggressively bring fraudsters to justice," Breitmeyer said in the news release.
Before she joined the UIA on May 15, Breitmeyer was the director of the corporations, securities and commercial licensing bureau’s regulatory compliance division at the state's Department of Licensing and Regulatory Affairs.
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In an interview at last week's Mackinac Policy Conference, Dale spoke with the Free Press about the progress it's making on waivers for overpayments and gave an update on a new computer system the agency had purchased.
About the waivers
Dale said in the interview that the UIA is continuing to issue waivers to claimants who were told they were overpaid benefits during the pandemic and were then asked to pay the money back. In December, the agency was ordered to suspend collection activities for all claimants who were told they had been overpaid jobless benefits as part of a class action against the agency.
In 2022, the agency issued 76,000 waivers for those overpayments totaling $550 million. Dale said the UIA will have additional waivers coming late this summer.
"We are nearly through that backlog of protests and appeals and expect probably by late June, if not before that, we'll have completed that" process, she said.
About the new benefits system
Dale said the new unemployment benefits system, which was first announced in November, is still on track to be fully operational in 2025.
She said the agency is in the early stages of replacing the old system with a new Deloitte system, which will be called uFACTS, but everything "is going as planned."
The Deloitte system will replace the existing decade-old unemployment benefits system, which was implemented under Gov. Rick Snyder and found to have a 93% error rate in making false fraud findings between 2013 and 2015, affecting tens of thousands of Michigan workers.
Contact Adrienne Roberts: amroberts@freepress.com.
This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Michigan adds a legal adviser to help pursue unemployment 'bad actors'
