DENVER – Colorado’s Unemployment Fraud Task Force referred 17 cases for criminal prosecution tied to $300,000 worth of alleged unemployment fraud, state officials announced Friday.
The criminal referrals represent the first year of work from the task force, which Colorado launched on March 4 last year in the wake up more than 1 million fraudulent unemployment claims that had been filed by that point in the pandemic.
“The Unemployment Fraud Task Force has worked collaboratively with state and federal agencies to investigate those suspected of defrauding the state’s unemployment insurance program. These are complex cases that take time to develop, and now several cases have been referred to various DA’s for prosecution,” Attorney General Phil Weiser said in a statement, adding there would be more prosecutions to come.
The task force is comprised of investigators with the Colorado Department of Labor and Employment, the Colorado Bureau of Investigation, the Colorado Department of Revenue’s Criminal Tax Enforcement Section, the U.S. Attorney’s Office, Secret Service and the Office of the Inspector General for the U.S. Labor Department.
The early work it did involved preventing more fraud from occurring within the state’s unemployment system, which was plagued by fraud, particularly in the federal pandemic unemployment programs rolled out during the worst parts of the pandemic.
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