Their unemployment benefits were ‘hijacked;’ a year later, the state still hasn’t tracked down their money

CHICAGO (CBS) — Sharon Thomas and Mike Cosmas don’t know each other, but they have something in common: they say their unemployment benefits were “hijacked.”

It all began last year after they were laid off due to the pandemic. At first, Thomas, a former retail worker, and Cosmas, a former school bus driver, both received their benefits on time from the Illinois Department of Employment Security (IDES).

Then, suddenly, the money stopped coming in. They learned a scammer hacked their accounts and switched the bank account information.

“When I was supposed to get the money in the bank, it wasn’t there,” Cosmas said.

Since the start of the pandemic, IDES struggled to contain fraud on various levels – from scammers intercepting payments, to bad actors filing fraudulent unemployment claims. While unemployment numbers are back to pre-pandemic levels, failures within IDES continue to prevent those who’ve been laid off from getting paid when they need it most.

When someone reports they did not receive their benefits on time, IDES is supposed to trace where the money went. But in thousands of instances the agency was slow to investigate, a CBS 2 investigation found, and IDES refuses to release critical documents that could show the scope of the problem.

‘My savings are drained’

Cosmas, who lives in Cicero, said he did everything right once he realized he had been hacked. After repeated calls, emails and visits to local IDES offices, he was told his money – now totaling $6,400 – would hit his account in weeks.

CBS 2 reviewed Cosmas’ payment history which shows IDES payments going into accounts associated with two different banks between March and July of 2021 – either of which were his.

A year later, he still hasn’t received his money.

“I’ve been stressed out, I’ve been losing sleep, I don’t know what to do,” Cosmas said. “I’m mad, I’m outraged. I’m outraged that this is going on this long.”

Cosmas isn’t alone. Thomas also struggled to get help from IDES at first – an experience echoed by many

 who were laid off during the pandemic. She said over the course of many months she worked hard to do what the representatives asked to confirm her identity.

“I have sent them my social security card and my driver’s license at least six or seven times in various departments,” said Thomas, who lives in Midlothian. “And when you phone there, you can’t get the same person twice – you’re put into a call system that, whenever somebody’s free, they call you next. And I just kept waiting and hoping.”

She and Cosmas even filed multiple payment tracers for the weeks they were owed unemployment. Tracers are critical forms meant to help IDES investigate when unemployment money was never received by the claimant. The process requires filling out the total dollar amount someone believes they were owed for the time periods in which they did not receive their benefits.

Thomas believed IDES stopped the fraud when she first reported it last May. Four months later, after speaking to agency representatives, she thought her issue had been resolved. Eventually, she got a call back from another representative. Instead of getting the money she was owed back, she was told that check was released – but not to her.

“And I just was in tears,” Thomas said. “I’m like, how could this happen?”

Despite the two claimants reporting they were hacked to IDES a year ago, neither has received the money they reported missing.

“I’ve had to use my credit cards where they’re almost maxed out to help buy things,” said Thomas, who is now owed $5,472 in benefits. “I’ve had to put off dental work because I just didn’t have the extra funds.”

Cosmas said after IDES’ failure to resolve the issue, he believes IDES is “mismanaged” and “not competent.”

“How can you do this to the people? How can you let this go on? How come you’re not taking care of it?” Cosmas asked. “To promise us we’ll get our money but were not getting it. This was meant for people that were in need at the time of need.”

Cosmas added he’s had to dip into other funds to get by.

“My savings are drained,” he’s said. “I have no savings…It’s hurt me. Basically, if something comes up, I have nothing to fall back on.”

Lack of transparency

Cosmas and Thomas weren’t the only ones who filed payment tracers to figure out where their unemployment benefits went.

IDES said claimants submitted 3,821 tracers from March 1, 2021 through Nov. 30, 2021. That’s 3,821 times laid-off workers reported they did not receive their benefits in less than a year. In that timeframe, IDES completed investigations and paid out on 958 tracers, or less than a third.

While not every tracer is fraud related, IDES received a record number of tracers last year during a time where fraud was pervasive. The agency said they only received about four a year before the pandemic.

Multiple IDES employees, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said the state is failing to track money and recover benefits through tracers in a timely manner. Many of them, they said, were filed by victims of fraud.

Thomas said she mailed in her tracer forms in October of 2021. By December, an IDES representative told her the agency couldn’t find them. She had to resubmit and was told to check back in 45 days. More than two months later, she’s still waiting for an outcome.

“[The IDES employee] found they’d just been sitting idle, and they didn’t move forward to the next step like they should’ve been,” Thomas said.

Thomas’ lengthy wait for a resolution backs up similar stories shared by sources. The employees detailed multiple other year-old cases they’ve seen, where claimants are still waiting for IDES to complete its investigations.

Thomas questioned how that could be.

“How many people are working on them?” Thomas asked. “Why is it taking so long?”

CBS 2 sent IDES spokesman Will Gomberg a detailed list of questions for this report, including how many employees are tasked with processing tracers, and why it’s taken months – sometimes more than a year – for IDES to track claimants’ money.

Gomberg did not directly respond to those specific questions, but he provided a statement saying the agency continues “to work diligently to quantify the impact of these complex, organized fraud schemes in Illinois.”

The statement also said IDES “is unable to comment on ongoing investigations, so as to not impair” the work it does with law enforcement agencies. It also said it would not “share in-depth information regarding the state’s anti-fraud practices.”

“IDES continues to make use of new technology resources to verify identities, protect claimants, and ensure the continued integrity of the state’s unemployment insurance system,” the statement said. You can read the full list of CBS 2’s questions and IDES’ responses below. 

While IDES has been mum on specifics, the agency was having internal conversations about tracers late last year. Key unemployment program managers and others in the agency’s fraud unit met about the payment tracer process in the fall, according to emails obtained by CBS 2. Still, IDES does not separately track how much money claimants requested through payment tracers. The forms themselves, which detail dollar amounts, are the closest things the public has to understand the scope of the problem, including total amount potentially intercepted by scammers.

In December of 2021, CBS 2 filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request asking for copies of the 958 completed tracers since March of 2021 – when sources said they began to see the numbers spike. But IDES denied CBS 2’s request, saying it would be “unduly burdensome” to review and redact the personal information of claimants from the records.

Attorney and FOIA expert Matt Topic, who reviewed CBS 2’s request and IDES’ denial, said he believes the agency is off base in its denial.

“My first reaction was it’s simply wrong. It’s not a significant burden,” Topic said, adding it wouldn’t be difficult for the agency to redact the private information.

“The work involved to just mechanically redact the same fields of information on 900 or so pages is trivial in comparison to the importance of having transparency on this issue,” Topic said.

He said public agencies often overuse the “unduly burdensome” exemption in the state’s FOIA law, failing to weigh the public’s right to know. He believes IDES is no different in this case, and that the agency’s claim doesn’t “have any basis in reality.”

“We’ve seen time and time again that government agencies and other government actors, when they’re allowed to act in secret, will make bad decisions that are not in the best interest of the public,” Topic said. “So whenever public officials hide information like this, we should be asking ourselves, why are they hiding this?” Topic asked. “Why won’t they just turn this over? What do they have to hide?”

This is not the first time FOIA experts have raised questions about IDES’ transparency. In 2020, the agency refused to release

 Equal Opportunity complaints about its then-acting director. One expert with the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press said it was troubling.

The lack of transparency also fits a pattern, CBS 2 found. In previous news reports, the agency has refused to answer basic request requests for information, including questions about security incidents that happened at its offices and how much the state has lost to fraudsters.

It’s unclear whether IDES is tracking how much it’s lost to fraud generally. Billons have been paid on fraudulent claims nationwide – an issue Illinois still has not put a number on more than two years into the pandemic.

That’s despite other states making similar information public. Michigan paid out at least $8.4 billion in fraudulent payments from March 1, 2020 to Sept. 30, 2021, according to a report from the state’s Department of Labor and Economic Opportunity. In the same timeframe, the Arizona Department of Economic Security paid at least $4.4 billion. California paid $20 billion.

“What are they trying to hide?” Thomas asked about IDES. “If I sent these payment tracers out two and a half months ago, almost three months, why have I not heard anything?”

The state has not only failed to answer fraud-related questions from CBS 2, but also from state lawmakers asking for transparency.

State Rep. Martin McLaughlin (R-Lake Barrington) said his office has been inundated with unemployment-related complaints from constituents, including victims of fraud. But during a Feb. 9 hearing of the Illinois House Appropriations – General Services Committee, he couldn’t get answers from the agency’s Acting Director Kristin Richards.

“I know last year, we talked about IDES in the spring, we had some questions about the amount of fraud that was taking place. What is the estimate?” McLaughlin asked.

While Richards said IDES was “working closely” with external auditors to quantify the amount of fraud that occurred during the pandemic, and that IDES had stopped over 2 million fraudulent claims, she did not have an answer.

“I do not have numbers for the members of the committee at this time, but those are figures we continue to work on,” Richards said.

But McLaughlin wants specifics. As complaints about IDES continue to pour into his office, he said knowing the number is paramount – especially when it comes to tax dollars.

“This is a really a bipartisan frustration. It comes down to accountability of taxpayers’ money,” he said in an interview.

 “We have the responsibility to make sure that money has been appropriately utilized, and it should have had an improvement as to the tracking of fraud, reporting of fraud, and none of that has occurred,” he continued. “So, frustrating is an understatement, where we find ourselves as legislators and the responsibility of oversight of the taxpayers’ dollars.”

McLaughlin also questioned how the state can correct a problem if it doesn’t know the scope – something IDES has not shared with the public. He believes “IDES has completely failed at almost every level.”

“The agency is not functioning properly at all,” he said. “We can’t get basic answers on where the money has gone, how much fraud there has been.”

Looking ahead

CBS 2 has filed an appeal with Illinois Attorney General Kwame Raoul, asking his office to review potential FOIA violations in connection with IDES’ refusal to release copies of payment tracers.

“People have a right, under the law, to government records except in limited circumstances and that right gets abused very often,” Topic said. “That seems to be what’s happening here. And people shouldn’t stand for it.”

As for those still waiting for their benefits, Cosmas will rely on his social security, but not for long. And he said the money he is owed would help him get back on his feet after being laid off as a school bus driver.

Thomas, who was also laid off during the pandemic, said she should not have to wait a year for money that is owed to her.

“It’s just that it’s frustrating,” Thomas said. “I just want to get my life back. I just want to pay my bills. Somebody else is living a life of luxury off my money and I’m struggling.”

She and Cosmas both believe IDES is failing the people it’s supposed to serve.

“They lost their jobs because of the pandemic and all that,” Cosmas said. “Now you owe me the money, you’ve cost me a lot, you’ve depleted my savings. Where’s the money?”