THORNTON, Colo. — A Thornton woman who spent 278 hours on hold waiting for answers about her Colorado unemployment benefits finally received payment in mid-November, more than five months after losing her job.
Lisa Craig said she checked her bank account shortly after 9NEWS first reported on her situation to find the payment of about $10,000 – the amount the state owed her, minus tax.
"I was just like hallelujah, praise God," she said. "I literally ran through the house doing a dance."
Craig had called the Colorado Department of Labor and Employment (CDLE) dozens of times but only spoke to a customer service representative about five times. She said she was stuck on a "program integrity hold" with no understanding of how to remedy it.
She's not alone. For months, 9NEWS has covered stories of people like Craig, who the state labor department have left in limbo after starting a new fraud detection system.
"It is absolutely ridiculous," she said in the Nov. 14 interview. "I just don't know what else to do anymore."
Craig exhausted her savings and had to dip into her 401(k) to pay bills as she searched for another job. She described waking up in the middle of the night afraid of how she would make ends meet.
The day the state finally paid her, she said she slept 12 hours.
"That night I slept the best I slept in months," she said.
But Craig expressed concern for others who are still stuck without payment after months waiting for CDLE. "They are not being good stewards of the money," she said of the state agency.
In a statement earlier in November, CDLE said it moved resources around to help claimants' experience and given additional training to call center representatives "to quickly identify program integrity (PI) holds and send them to newly trained workers for review."
"We anticipate most [program integrity] issues to be cleared within a week of claimants contacting us, unless there are risk factors that require additional investigation," said Philip Spesshardt, director of Colorado's Division of Unemployment Insurance.
"These recent adjustments have rebalanced and stabilized the system to work as originally anticipated, allowing us to stop identity theft claims in their tracks while trying to minimize the impact to innocent victims of identity theft," he said.
Craig said she is still looking for a job in marketing and is considering starting out on her own after months without luck finding work.
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