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Inadequate tracking by the Employment Security Department led to Washington workers receiving both unemployment insurance and Paid Family and Medical Leave benefits at the same time, a new state audit found.
Under state law, no one is allowed to receive unemployment insurance and family leave benefits within the same week.
But findings from the State Auditor’s Office found 2,270 instances from July 2022 to June 2023 where the department paid both types of benefits to the same recipients in the same week. That totaled about $1.9 million.
Overall, the department paid about $1.3 billion in Paid Family and Medical Leave claims and about $1.2 billion in unemployment insurance claims during the 2023 budget year.
“While the total amount of dual benefits paid is not high relative to the size of these programs, Paid Family and Medical Leave is funded by working people and their employers,” State Auditor Pat McCarthy wrote in a letter to the department. “Any improperly paid benefits represent an unnecessary cost to them and a reduction in available funds for eligible people.”
The increasingly popular Paid Family and Medical Leave program helps people take paid time off from work if they have a serious health condition, if they’re caring for family members, or if they have a new child. It’s funded by a tax that both workers and employers pay.
Anyone who is receiving unemployment insurance is disqualified from getting paid family leave benefits at the same time, according to state law.The Employment Security Department is supposed to watch for overlapping participants between the two programs. Until this year, it did not have a process to do so.
State law requires claimants to repay the department if they have been overpaid — including if they simultaneously receive payments from both programs. However, the department did not have a process to assess and collect overpayments either.
The audit also found instances where weekly claim payments for paid family leave were incorrectly calculated, resulting in claimants receiving the wrong amount of benefits.
To address the issues, the auditor’s office recommended the department implement controls to detect and prevent people from receiving both types of payments at once and to create an official process for handling penalties, interest and overpayments.
In its response to the audit, the Employment Security Department noted that the amount of overpayments in 2023 made up just 0.0014% of all benefits paid out during that time.
Since the audit was conducted, the department began implementing fixes. In January 2023, it started manually crossmatching to identify claimants receiving both benefits. It also submitted a corrective action plan with further steps that required additional funding.
In July of this year, the department received that funding, which will help hire staff to automate the system for assessing and recovering overpayments, spokesman Chris Barron wrote in an email. That work will start in January and will likely finish in December next year.
The department is requesting further funding starting in 2026 to create a customer service team to help those who apply for multiple programs at the time of their application to avoid any overpayments, according to the department’s response to the audit.
To fix incorrect weekly claim payments, the department said it is currently reviewing its calculation processes to find ways to limit manual data entry, which it admitted can lead to errors. That work is ongoing through next spring.