To qualify for an unemployment check in
Washington State you are required to work at getting employed. The rule is you
must actually apply for at least three jobs a week.
Busted!
It turns out that over 9,000 of those people never fulfilled that taxing obligation – pun intended! You did, by the way, working so that they were paid consistently out of your paycheck.
investigators reviewed the job-search logs of more than 66,000 people last year, finding that 9,000 had failed to look for work while collecting $23 million in benefits.
"Unemployment benefits are not meant to be a paid vacation," Employment Security Commissioner Paul Trause said in a statement. "If you're not making a legitimate attempt to get back to work, there's a good chance we're going to find out and make you return the benefits."
Also earlier this year, state officials said nearly 7,000 people lied and cheated to collect unemployment checks last year, a 56 percent rise in fraud cases since 2009.