The Louisiana Legislative Auditor finds $1.08 million in state and federal unemployment benefits were paid out to 374 dead Louisianans since March of 2020. That’s about .013% of the $8.5 billion in total benefits that have been paid since the beginning of the pandemic.
Data Analytics Manager Chris Magee said the Louisiana Workforce Commission does have a process to weed out dead applicants or recipients and managed to catch roughly 8,000 with their current system.
“Sometimes this death data, that comes from parish coroners and medical professionals is not submitted timely so the Louisiana Workforce Commission did necessarily know about those individuals being deceased,” said Magee. “This is a small dollar amount whenever you look at it in conjunction with the overall dollar amount that they paid out.”
Magee said because of death data reporting delays elsewhere $629,000 in payments could not have been prevented, but $123,000 in payments could have been prevented if LWC were to start processing Social Security death data weekly.
“That could identify these deceased individuals more quickly and thus stop dollars from going out the door more quickly,” said Magee. “LWC did state that they were going to work with the Department of Health to obtain this file on a weekly basis instead of a monthly basis.”
The Auditor’s report also said $337,000 in payments should have been prevented under the current system but managed to slip through.
Workforce Commission Secretary Ava Cates said all things considered the department did a good job on this issue given the pandemic condition conditions and the historic demand for UI.
“If you add it up, the Auditor has gone through a number of processes and what we did in response for COVID, again something that we had no precedence no business rules for, we are still in the 99% ratio,” said Cates.
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