Kansas is cracking down on unemployment insurance fraud – something the state says has been a major problem. In the last five years, the Kansas Department of Labor (KDOL) has investigated almost 21,000 cases of potential unemployment insurance fraud and recovered more than $23 million in fraudulently obtained benefits.
“The KDOL Employment Security Trust Fund was designed to benefit workers who have lost their jobs through no fault of their own,” state Labor Secretary Lana Gordon said in a statement. “By aggressively targeting fraud and actively recovering overpayment benefits, we’re protecting taxpayers and hardworking Kansans.”
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Gordon told the Lawrence, Kansas,
Journal-World that the state received a grant from the US Labor Department to raise public awareness about unemployment fraud.
“As we work on this, we have become better at identifying fraud before it hits our system, but I think it’s always important to the integrity of the system and to protect the dollars in the trust fund so they go to people who are lawfully entitled to it rather than others who are trying to defraud the system,” she said.
Gordon told the
Journal-World that the agency did not prosecute people for making unintentional technical errors on unemployment insurance applications, but would prosecute those who knowingly tried to defraud the system.
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