Unemployment scam hits Holmes Co. hard
An unemployment scam has created a mess in the Holmes County local government landscape, where dozens of fraudulent claims have been submitted. County officials acted quickly and connected with state officials to initiate an attempt to curb the scam.
Unemployment scams reported to Ohio Job & Family Services became a rampant issue during the pandemic years beginning in 2021, when cybercriminals began taking advantage and reporting unemployment requests from accounts of people who were still working.
Recently, another rash of incidents has left Holmes County and many other counties with a bevy of unemployment requests that have proven to be false.
Holmes County commissioner Dave Hall recently met with other state commissioners at the Ohio County Commissioner Board Meeting in Columbus, where they touched on many topics, with the unemployment issue being at the forefront.
“We had a really good meeting with lots of great discussion,” Hall said. “There were a lot of side meetings between counties that are similar in size and have been dealing with the same economic and growth types of issues, but the fraudulent activity that’s been taking place with the unemployment scam was a hot topic.”
At a recent zoom meeting between the Holmes County commissioners, Holmes County auditor Jackie McKee, Michele Gerber of the auditor’s office, Holmes County prosecutor Matt Muzik and Holmes County director of human resources Misty Burns, Burns produced a large stack of paperwork presenting many false claims that have been submitted to Ohio JFS that has created some difficult situations for the county.
Hall said the unemployment scam has been ravaging every county in Ohio, but he said Holmes County was among the first to bring it to the attention of the state through the zoom meeting.
“We are fortunate to have some great people in place who recognized the issue and brought it to the commissioners’ attention quickly, and we were able to take it to the state for discussion,” Hall said. “We produced a huge stack of fraudulent unemployment requests, and they were pretty shocked.”
Hall said Holmes County leadership has been on the leading edge of bringing this issue to light, and in conversing with other commissioners at the recent meeting, he realized county governments across the state are facing similar issues.
“I think before we met there wasn’t a great deal of discussion going on, but when we presented our case to the state, it got their attention quickly,” Hall said.
In presenting the tall stack of unemployment requests, Hall said Holmes County’s group reiterated that Holmes County has the lowest unemployment rate in the state and the county’s stability in its employee ranks is top-notch.
“I told them that we don’t lay people off, so something is not right here,” Hall said.
Burns said she recently received a letter stating that unemployment claims had been filed on behalf of one of the county’s employees. That quickly raised a red flag.
“This person is fully employed, and we’ve never laid them off,” Burns said. “Obviously, it’s fraudulent.”
She said the process of correcting the fraudulent claim is simply her checking a box claiming the person is fully employed and never filed the request. She would fax it in, and that would take care of the issue.
However, she said the sheer volume of claims Holmes County was receiving made it more difficult for the state to field each request, and some were being stopped while others were going through and the state was releasing funds to whoever was propagating the scam.
That has created another issue, that being that the state is now requesting that counties and townships need to pay these claims that have slipped through.
Muzik said that even though these are fraudulent claims, it has put the onus of covering the costs on counties and townships.
He said he contacted many other county prosecutors who were facing similar challenges.
Muzik did praise Ohio Auditor of State Keith Faber for his effort in working with counties on the issue, saying Faber has been diligent in listening and acting on the ongoing problems.
“It shouldn’t be that we file these requests as fraud and we still get charged,” Muzik said. “We should be able to say stop, and they’re stopped. That was eventually the answer we got to if it’s a known fraudulent claim.”
Burns added that Holmes County did remit a $6,000 payment on the fraudulent claims that the state said it would reimburse, but she said that reimbursement has yet to come back.
In addition, there is an additional $14,000 bill pending that she hasn’t yet paid.
“It’s still there, and I’ve gotten plenty of letters stating that we had to pay, or we’d be facing penalties,” Burns said.
With the state facing an inordinate number of these fraudulent claims, it has been a chaotic time for them, and Hall said he can understand the confusion, but Burns said the state continues to question layoffs due to the pandemic.
“The person I was working with said to me, ‘You mean you didn’t lay anyone off during Covid?’ I told her we laid no one off. We were fully employed and working,” Burns said.
Holmes County’s ability to attack this issue quickly once it realized there was fraudulent activity going on has helped deter the issue.
Hall said in the 10 days since they met with the state, no new unemployment claims for the county have come in.
“I was getting two or three submissions every day,” Burns said. “It’s now stopped, and I haven’t received any more.”
The Ohio Department of Job & Family Services has made strides in ceasing this issue.
ODJFS director Matt Damschroder recently released a statement following the indictment of Donesha Shepard, a former ODJFS intermittent employee, and three co-defendants on charges of theft, tampering with records, telecommunications fraud and bribery.
In his statement, Damschroder said, “We are pleased with news of the indictment of four individuals in conjunction with fraud in the pandemic unemployment assistance program. This is not a victimless crime. These individuals allegedly stole from taxpayers. Fraud schemes also harmed legitimate unemployment claimants who were hurting during the pandemic by making it harder to receive needed benefits in a timely fashion. When we discovered that individuals like these may have been illegally abusing their access to our systems, we took immediate action to stop it and work with law enforcement to investigate and prosecute it. We thank all those agencies who helped bring this about and will continue working to ensure more criminals are brought to justice.”