DEED official defends Minnesota’s pandemic unemployment response, outlines fraud controls and recovery challenges

Evan Roe, deputy commissioner at the Department of Employment and Economic Development, told the House fraud prevention and state oversight committee on April 7 that Minnesota’s unemployment insurance (UI) system paid about $14,800,000,000 in pandemic-era benefits and processed roughly 1,300,000 applications, with 873,000 Minnesotans receiving at least one payment.

Roe presented a primer on unemployment insurance and explained how federal pandemic programs were delivered through the state system, described fraud and overpayment vectors seen during the pandemic, and summarized the state’s technical and administrative controls. He and committee members discussed federal review findings and recovery rates for overpayments.

Roe said the state’s UI program is a federal–state partnership created under federal law and administered by Minnesota under statutory rules. He described the program’s purpose as “providing workers who are unemployed through no fault of their own a temporary partial wage replacement to assist the unemployed…