DENVER — Helpless doesn't begin to describe how three months of waiting has felt for Anna Goss.
"It feels like you’re being dangled over a black hole with teeth," she said. "It’s really scary."
She was laid off from her tech job in March and successfully applied for unemployment benefits from the Colorado Department of Labor and Employment (CDLE) shortly after. The "dangling" began two weeks after the payments started.
"I only got really like two on-time payments from CDLE and then at the end of April they sent me a letter that said I had a program integrity hold on my account and I needed to prove my identity," she said.
Program integrity holds are how the state combats fraudulent unemployment claims. It's also what's holding up payments to Goss -- even after she submitted the paperwork to prove her claim is legit.
"The longer it has gone, the more worried I've gotten," she said.
Goss is worried -- Justin Bernal is desperate. "I've had my cell phone service turned off," he said. "I've had my internet service turned off."
He lost his job as a fraud analyst supervisor in March and received about a month and a half of unemployment benefits, he said. Then the state put a program integrity hold on his account, too.
"I have received an eviction letter," he said. "I am going to be evicted from my apartment very soon and I have no financial way to resume payments. I don't have the money right now."
Employment attorney Brian Stutheit said he receives approximately four calls per week from people who are stuck with program integrity holds on their legitimate claims.
"The system seems more concerned with preventing fraud than giving benefits to people who have earned them," he said.
In a statement to 9NEWS, CDLE's Director of the Division of Unemployment Insurance Philip Spesshardt said 22,000 new claims since April 1 have program integrity holds, representing more than a third of applicants.
"The department has been working over the last six weeks to identify legitimate claims held up by fraud holds and move them for release," Spesshardt said.
"This has taken time due to the high volume of fraud and the high level of information these fraudsters have on the victims they are targeting. We are fine-tuning and checking the validity of this set of claims and look towards releasing those of low risk for fraud in the next few days," he said.
The state said only 5,766 claimants are still trying to get benefits, a sign they may be real people. The rest, Spesshardt said, gave up their claims after the state flagged them.
"A lot of people give up," Stutheit said. "I know that to be the case."
He said trying to help unemployment claimants is nearly impossible -- because it's nearly impossible to get a person at CDLE to answer the phone. He said some of his emails about clients have bounced back from CDLE email addresses.
"It hurts people. I will have people call me who are in poverty," he said.
People like Justin Bernal who said he doesn't know what he's going to do next. "I feel like I'm at the end of my rope," he said.
Anna Goss said her savings account can't sustain her much longer. "We all pay into this system, we deserve to use it when we need it and that's not happening for a good chunk of Coloradans right now," she said.
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