The Guam Department of Labor has just announced that this week’s unemployment batch was “cancelled” today (Tuesday), as the number of fraudulent claims was too high.
On the air with Newstalk K57, David Dell’Isola, the GDOL director, said their software vendor had batched the unemployment claims overnight covering clean claims up to August 23.
However, Dell’Isola says when they got back the file of the claims, they noticed way too many bogus claims that got through their filters.
“We had a rough week last week…we got hit with brute force [fraud] attacks,” said Dell’Isola.
“I just have to pull the plug on this one right now.”
The batch came back totaling $32 million but the GDOL director says that’s way too high and the numbers didn’t add up.
He says the GDOL team is working to clean this latest list, however, they’ll need to re-batch altogether and he doesn’t have a new set date yet.
“This is not the first time I’ve had to delay…but, this is the first time it’s as bad as it is and I have to cancel,” said Dell’Isola. “It could be a couple of days but I won’t know until we really dig in.”
This was going to the be the first Tuesday as part of the new two-week batching and payout cycle the department transitioned to.
GDOL changing unemployment batching frequency; payments every 2 weeks now
“We need to regroup, clean, re-batch and we’re going to do that as fast as we can…that’s our priority right now,” said Dell’Isola.
“I don’t want to sound like a broken record but fraud continues to be our biggest issue…we’re talking about 90% of the new claims coming in [are fraud].”
Dell’Isola has consistently spoken of the high number of fraudulent cases bogging down the GDOL system.
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