The program will now be receiving assistance in being able to spot “suspicious patterns” among those claiming benefits.
The struggling unemployment insurance program in California is now working with Pondera Solutions in order to be able to detect fraud more effectively and save the program – and tax payers – money.
This new partnership is meant to help to boost the technology capabilities of the program.
The unemployment insurance program in California is currently operating on an old computer system that was causing thousands of legitimate claims for benefits to be flagged to be either delayed or denied. Now, it is working with Pondera Solutions in order to add a new, high tech component that will help to overcome this problem and spot fraud more effectively. This will help the Employment Development Department in the state to eliminate issues that are now plaguing the computer system that is about three decades old.
The current system for unemployment insurance fraud detection has required considerable manual processing.
This forced staffers at the department to have to put in hours of extra time as they manually dealt with cases in order to try to spot any kinds of irregularities and to be able to find cases of potential fraud. The result was that tens of thousands of claims that were actually legitimate, for benefits of up to $450 per week, were being either delayed or denied. This made residents of California who were already struggling because they were unemployed have to face even greater difficulties in being able to make their rent, put gas in the car, and make sure that there was food on the table.
According to the Sacramento area based Pondera Solutions chief exec, Jon Coss, the goal of the company in working with the department is to be able to spot unemployment insurance fraud within the system as quickly as possible, with no tolerance for fraudulent documents. The agency is hoping that this will make the entire process more accurate as well as faster, thereby making it cheaper, as well. It has been estimated that tens of millions will be saved every year.