Your Pass
Related Articles
Posted:
Update:
FRANKFORT, Ky – In order to mitigate fraud and allow state unemployment officials to focus on helping Kentuckians with legitimate claims, the UI Office will require all claimants to they meet a new identity verification requirement starting next week.
As of November 4, all Unemployment Insurance (UI) claimants who have not verified their identity with ID.me, a third-party identity verification provider, will need to create an account with the company. and verify their identity to access their request.
Labor Cabinet Secretary Jamie Link said requiring all applicants to go through ID.me before they can access the portal is the cabinet’s latest move to coerce the malicious actors who have filled the system with unemployment insurance fraudulent claims during the global COVID-19 pandemic. . These fraudulent claims, he said, have hampered the agency’s ability to deliver timely benefits to Kentuckians who rightly deserve them.
“This strategic move should help reduce the number of fraudulent unemployment insurance claims that have weighed on the program,” Link said. “This will dramatically reduce the time our employees spend working or even processing fraudulent claims and will allow us to realign our resources to help claimants who have waited far too long for help. ”
State unemployment officials began using ID.me in June as part of a series of actions to curb fraud and began targeting thousands of dormant claims over the summer.
From June 30 to September 1, the agency sent over 126,000 emails to email addresses associated with dormant complaints, demanding that the identity associated with those complaints be verified within a specific time frame.
By mid-September, the state unemployment office had issued written decisions on 112,801 of those 126,000 claims, effectively disqualifying them. As of October 25, a total of 539,529 decisions had been made on complaints without identity verification.
