Lauren Weber

speaker

740 appearances 12 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2017 last heard Dec 2024

Lauren Weber’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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WSJ Your Money Briefing · Some Unemployment Benefit Recipients Have to Pay Money Back · 5 Oct 2020 podcast

And then a few months later, got a notice saying that she had been overpaid by about $13,000 and owed that money back to the state. voice-verified

Yeah, for a lot of these people, they're self-employed. voice-verified

And so some of them have a little bit of money coming in if perhaps, you know, they've been able to restart their business a bit. voice-verified

But, you know, none of these people are back to where they were prior to the pandemic. voice-verified

This was somebody who's a health coach. voice-verified

She does her coaching face to face mostly. voice-verified

You know, it's very hard to build your business back up to where it was when things were going well. voice-verified

Well, this is one of the things that's very difficult to figure out. voice-verified

In many cases, from what I can tell, it's the state agencies that operate the unemployment system that have made mistakes. voice-verified

And part of it is very understandable. voice-verified

And experts I spoke with said, voice-verified

You know, we understand why mistakes got made. voice-verified

They were trying to start up these programs so quickly in an effort to get relief out to the people who needed it that in some instances they may have misinterpreted the federal guidance or they had people on the phones, you know, answering phones from people who were trying to claim benefits, who didn't know the answers to questions. voice-verified

So it's not surprising that a lot of mistakes were made. voice-verified

The hard part is that now people are being asked to repay for those mistakes. voice-verified

And again, they don't have the money to do that. voice-verified

It looks like in some cases, states were using self-employed people's gross income, in other words, their business income, the revenue that they had taken in in their business, rather than their personal income or their net income, which is the income after you pay expenses like business insurance, some rent, and items like that. voice-verified

So of course, your gross revenue, gross income is going to be much higher than what you actually took home. voice-verified

So when benefits were being calculated based on that higher number, voice-verified

people were given a bigger, fatter benefit check, only to find out later that it was incorrect and that they owe a lot of that money back. voice-verified

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