Washington hit by second wave of unemployment fraud — but state says criminals aren’t getting paid much

SEATTLE – One year after the state of Washington disclosed hundreds of millions of dollars in unemployment fraud, criminals appear to be making a second run at the state’s jobless system.

But so far, the thieves aren’t getting away with much money, the Employment Security Department said.

ESD officials acknowledged this week that spikes in weekly jobless claims in May were similar to surges last year that paralyzed unemployment systems in Washington and other states as criminals used stolen Social Security numbers and other personal data to file fake claims for billions of dollars in pandemic benefits.

This second wave of fraud is smaller than what struck last year, ESD officials said. The ESD’s updated security flagged most of the suspicious claims before any funds went out and without further delaying legitimate benefit payments, agency officials said.

“Our fraud controls are working,” Cami Feek, ESD’s acting commissioner, said this week. “We’re catching (the bogus claims) and not paying them out.”

The agency said it first saw suspicious activity during the first week of May, as new, or “initial,” unemployment claims jumped nearly 60%, to 16,605, over the prior week. That was well above the 11,000 to 13,000 weekly claims the agency has averaged in recent months.

The number of new weekly jobless claims increased last week as layoffs increased in the health care and social assistance, educational services and retail sectors, according to the ESD said.

While the ESD said its “controls to identify the fraudulent claims are working,” the applications showed up in weekly claim numbers even though they are not paid.

The agency did not specify the number of fraudulent claim applications received last week.

New jobless claims are now 86% below applications filed during the same time last year amid the pandemic, according to the ESD.

Laid-off workers in Spokane County filed 1,373 new unemployment claims the week ending May 15, compared with 1,119 claims filed the week before, according to the employment security department.

Spokesman-Review staff wirter Amy Edlen contributed to this report.