ULG and Pandemic Unemployment Assistance Overpayment Hearings

When the COVID-19 pandemic hit in March 2020, the federal government passed into law the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act of 2020 (the “CARES Act”). Among many other things, the CARES Act created the Pandemic Unemployment Assistance (“PUA”) program, to expand the number of people who could qualify for unemployment benefits during an unprecedented time.

The Act instructed the individual states to set up their own system by which claimants could apply for and collect PUA benefits. As the states were inundated with thousands of unemployment applications as they were trying to implement a brand-new program, it appears that many states simply took the stance that they would approve nearly all claimants and then investigate the individual claims later. Suffice to say, this created problems for claimants down the line. Months and sometimes even more than a year after people applied for and were approved for benefits, claimants in New Hampshire and Massachusetts were hit with notices of overpayment from the Department of Unemployment Assistance (“DUA”) in Massachusetts and the New Hampshire Employment Security (“NHES”), which informed them that thousands of dollars’ worth of PUA benefits they were approved for and received in 2020-2021were now owed back to the respective state agency.

The Unemployment Law Group (“ULG”) guided claimants with fighting these overpayment notices through a formal appeal hearing process. ULG Attorney Austin Smith and ULG Paralegal Courtney Clark navigated these hearings case by case, presenting compelling evidence to proves that our clients were in fact eligible for PUA benefits, and that DUA and NHES had made a mistake in assessing them with overpayments.

Clark and Smith took daily intake calls from people in need of assistance during this time.  They handled multiple hearings per week, and were overwhelmingly successful in their appeal hearings, resulting thousands of dollars in overpayments being reversed. For many clients, not only did ULG reverse the client’s overpayment, but they also entitled their clients to thousands of dollars in additional benefits for weeks in which they had continued to apply for unemployment benefits even after they had been preliminarily determined not to have been eligible for benefits.

ULG helped keep thousands of dollars in our clients’ pockets and the overall support and sense of relief we helped to provide our clients was invaluable to them.  ULG was grateful to offer this assistance through our area of expertise with handling unemployment cases and having the knowledge base and opportunity to help so many during this unprecedented time.

Ultimately, in early 2022, Massachusetts approved an emergency overpayment waiver for a portion of PUA cases, also known as the “Simplified Waiver”.  ULG is still guiding people through determining if they are eligible for the Simplified Waiver or an overpayment waiver in general. 

As the PUA cases now are subsiding nearly one year after the program itself ended in September 2021, ULG’s main practice will revert back to assisting regular non-PUA  unemployment appeal hearings, which ULG still handled throughout the pandemic in addition to their strong load of PUA cases. 

If you have been denied unemployment, have received a notice of overpayment or just need assistance with applying for unemployment in MA or NH, please contact ULG at 978-474-4774, by email at asmith@rosengoyal.com.