Multiple staff members inside Colorado’s unemployment insurance division have expressed alarm over what they called a “disturbing practice” of state officials asking claimants to cancel their appeals.
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On June 12, a hearing officer with the Colorado Department of Labor and Employment’s unemployment insurance appeals division told agency leaders in an email that she witnessed a hearing in which a claimant testified that the state called her and asked her to cancel her appeal concerning a benefit determination.
The division representative told the claimant that “it was unlikely that she would prevail,” the hearing officer wrote in the message, a copy of which was reviewed by The Denver Post.
“This is a disturbing practice,” Ashleigh Hall, the hearing officer, wrote to her colleagues. “If this is what the… team is doing, they need to stop it, as it will have a chilling effect on parties exercising their right to an appeal.”
Last week, a second hearing officer emailed a supervisor, asking for an update on this practice. The employee also included a summary of a call between state officials and a claimant in which the individual said that “he went through a lot of effort to prepare for the appeal and requested to continue with the appeal.”
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The hearing officer, Randy Stwalley, added his concern to leadership.
“Using minimally trained (employees) to dissuade parties from appealing decisions issued by the division, which is their legal right, doesn’t seem to be a good use of time or resources, and also raises ethical concerns,” he wrote.
The state’s labor department declined an interview request for this story. In a statement, the unemployment division’s director, Philip Spesshardt, said he believed this to be a “one-off instance” that leadership addressed quickly with additional training for the agents making these calls to claimants.
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These agents, he said, are trained to speak neutrally with claimants about their options while not encouraging any course of action over another. They are “taught to never encourage a claimant to withdraw an appeal,” Spesshardt said.
“We are committed to supporting unemployment insurance claimants throughout the life of their claim,” he said.
News of these emails comes nearly two months after The Post reported that the state doesn’t allow claimants to appeal determinations in which they are overpaid unemployment benefits, despite repeated instructions by the federal labor department to do so.
Colorado has known for years that its labor department is supposed to be offering these appeals, The Post found, but still has not implemented them. Leadership, in emails reviewed by The Post, worried that allowing these appeals would hurt the agency’s metrics, while Spesshardt, in one email, called them a “waste of time, energy and resources.”
The unemployment division has also been roiled by internal and external investigations amid staff whistleblower complaints and spiraling distrust between workers and supervisors, The Post reported.
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