Webinar: Unemployment & HR Risk Management with UST

It’s a familiar situation. A notice arrives informing you that your long-term employee, recently let go due to an unavoidable loss in funding, has filed for unemployment. “Oh,” you think, “nothing to do here. Of course Bob is entitled to unemployment benefits.” You set the notice aside and go about your day.

But wait, what’s wrong with this picture? You may not realize it, but disregarding that notice has just exposed your organization to serious risks.

UI Integrity

What is UI Integrity? Depending on which state you work in, it may already be familiar, but if you haven’t seen the impact of this federal legislation yet, it’s coming. Passed as part of the Trade Adjustment Assistance Extension Act of 2011, compliance with UI Integrity provisions is required of all states no later than October of 2013.

UI Integrity was designed to address one of the biggest weaknesses of Unemployment Insurance funds nationwide: the persistence of unemployment benefits paid in error. In fiscal year 2011 alone, nearly 12% of unemployment benefits nationwide—approximately $13 billion dollars—were paid in error. While a common conception is that benefits paid in error are the result of bureaucratic incompetence, the truth is that most of these unwarranted payments occur when the state awards benefits to an applicant whose claim is later overturned. Frequently, the decision to award benefits is reversed when the employer offers information that wasn’t provided to the state in response to their initial request.

To address this problem, UI Integrity requires employers to provide complete and timely information for all unemployment claims in response to the state’s first request. And to make sure the reform yields the necessary savings, this law has teeth. Any employer that fails to provide a complete and timely response to a claim loses any hope of relief from charges attributable to that claim—even if you ultimately win the claim, you’re still on the hook for any benefits paid to the claimant.

Even more alarming, if the state identifies a pattern of failure to provide complete and timely responses, your organization and your claims administrator are at risk of permanently losing valuable protest rights and/or facing monetary penalties.

The bottom line on UI Integrity is that your organization has to be prepared to provide a response to every claim, every time.

At UST, our goal is to do everything we can to help minimize our members’ unemployment costs. As a claims administrator, we help nonprofits respond in a timely manner to all unemployment claims, which gives us the best opportunity to save more funds for our members’ missions. Learn more about UST claim management here: http://www.chooseust.org/claims-savings/