By NICK GOSNELL
Hutch Post
HUTCHINSON, Kan. — The Hutchinson Chamber of Commerce held their legislative forum Saturday morning at the Fox Theatre in Hutchinson. Representatives Jason Probst, Paul Waggoner and Joe Seiwert were able to attend. The forum touched on multiple topics, but the struggles of the state Department of Labor probably took up the most time.
Representative Probst said the scope of the fraud problem is still unknown.
"The truth is, nobody actually knows, because we haven't been able to go case by case by case and figure out which one is fraud and which one is not," Probst said. "The underlying reason that we had so much fraud, keep in mind, I think the last report is, there's about $64 billion across the country that's been suspected fraud, about half of which they think has made its way overseas. These antiquated systems are not very adaptable to identity theft or fraud that we're seeing on a mass scale right now."
Probst said he was told the system is a 1977 relic that still uses COBOL programming language.
Paul Waggoner echoed comments he had made earlier in the session to Hutch Post about the open-ended nature of the federal program that allowed fraudsters to use the loopholes they have.
"Typically, when you file for unemployment, there is a letter that goes to your employer to confirm who you are, that you worked for them and the reason you were let go," Waggoner said. "What happened this time around was, the federal pandemic unemployment assistance covered people who don't have employers. If you were a hairdresser and had your own shop or if you had your own one person contractor business, because the federal government was effectively forcing you out of work, they set up the system where you could get unemployment, which in one sense makes a lot of sense, but the problem was, there was no one to verify anything about you."
Representative Seiwert is still searching for answers, too.
"There are a lot of questions on what happened, I can't answer them, because we can't get answers when we've tried," Seiwert said. "We've met with the people on Appropriations and also with Commerce committee and he's been working on this real hard. What the failure was, I don't know. I can't imagine who was not checking the checking account to see how you could dole out millions of dollars and not realize it. Being a business person and writing checks for myself, I look at my account every so often."
Seiwert did praise KDOL for getting legislators a way to help their constituents, but he's tired of making excuses and wants to be sure they can solve the problem going forward.