With fraud still a major concern for the state’s claimants, officials from the Office of Unemployment Insurance are shifting efforts toward the extended use of a third-party ID verification vendor — which will help sift through the thousands of unlawful requests still coming in for backpay.
Beginning November 4, any Kentuckian still working through the unemployment insurance queue will be required to register an account with ID.me — in what is a federally-accepted online company that can help verify identities in order to legally process claims.
In a statement from newly-installed Labor Cabinet Secretary Jamie Link, the June appointee said this latest maneuver will help “constrain malicious actors” who have created this log-jam of falsified claims during — and now after — the swathe of layoffs from the COVID-19 pandemic.
This has not only created undue hardship for those seeking fair reparations, but also the unemployment office — which has made the case workload nearly impossible to complete in a timely fashion.
ID.me is utilized by more than two-dozen states in the country, as well as several federal agencies such as the Department of Veterans Affairs and the Social Security Administration, and the supposedly secure website will now serve as a new single sign-on portal for claimants past, present and future.
During a test-run with ID.me in June, the agency sent more than 126,000 emails to addresses associated with dormant claims — requiring identity confirmation of those claims within a specific timestamp.
By the heart of September, more than 112,800 of those claims were disqualified and swept from the system — making room for active and delinquent cases.
As of October 25, more than 530,000 decisions had been written on claims lacking a verified identity.
With Kentucky’s unemployment insurance operating system running on an obsolete IT build from the 1970s, proposals for a new unemployment digital infrastructure closed Tuesday morning. The Kentucky Finance and Administration Cabinet, alongside an evaluation committee, will review the vendor proposals.
A new system isn’t expected to be installed for the next 18-to-24 months, but the Labor Cabinet believes this is the next important step.
According to the offices of Governor Andy Beshear, his most recent proposed budget included more than $1.1 million in General Fund spending through 2021 and more than $8.4 million in 2022 to restore and rebuild the employee base required to service what seems like an insurmountable tally of unemployment claims in the Commonwealth.
The General Assembly, however, removed said funding from the budget.
