LABOR AND EMPLOYMENT
Colorado’s Spiraling Unemployment Insurance Fraud BY NATALIE ROONEY
To say Fran Coet, CPA, partner with Atlas CPAs & Advisors, Westminster, was somewhat surprised in early January when she received a notice that she had filed an unemployment claim would be putting it mildly. Why? She had never filed such a claim. In fact, she hasn’t even taken time off since the beginning of the pandemic. “Accounting services were deemed essential so all of us have been working the whole time,” Coet says.
H
ackers somehow obtained her full Social Security Number, which was on the notice from the Colorado Department of Labor and Employment (CDLE), but it incorrectly listed her middle name as her last name. “That also was strange,” she says. Ultimately, Coet ended up with four unemployment notices for two different corporations she used to own and five different employees. At McPherson, Goodrich, Paolucci & Mihelich PC (MGPM) in Pueblo, President and
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NewsAccount | March/April 2021
Now, criminals have moved from attacking the PUA program to targeting Colorado’s regular unemployment insurance system. Managing Shareholder Ron Goodrich, CPA, CGMA, says his radar was triggered when one of his clients, a radiology practice,
received two unemployment claims. “These are long-term doctors who are still working,” Goodrich says. “It didn’t make sense.”
