‘I was not locked up at all’: Labor dept. mistakenly says man was jailed, must repay unemployment benefits 

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    OMAHA, NE (KETV) — An Omaha man said he has to repay $6-worth of unemployment benefits, but that’s hardly the cause of his concern.

Nebraska’s Labor Department listed a reason so serious he thought the letter was bogus.

Ben Rothe said the pandemic put him out of a job; he was furloughed in April by his company, then formally laid off months later. He filed for unemployment.
“I never had any problems, or had any errors with the unemployment system until this past Friday when I got that email out of the blue,” Rothe said.

That email shows he has to repay the Nebraska Department of Labor.

Then he read something even more concerning.

“You must be available to work to be eligible for unemployment, you were incarcerated and not available to work for four or more days,” Rothe said.

Here’s the problem: Rothe said he was never in jail!

“I have multiple people who can attest to where I was and the fact that I was not locked up at all,” Rothe said.

He thought it was a scam, but the phone numbers listed go to a valid state office.

Despite that, he said he couldn’t reach anyone that day by phone or email. And the appeal option on the website was not working.

“I was taken aback at first. Confusion and befuddlement and some slight anxiety, too,” Rothe said.

The Department of Labor said, “it appears to be an isolated incident in which the wrong language was included on the system-generated email.”

An email from a department spokesperson goes on to say the department is taking steps to prevent it from happening again.

Rothe has since found a new job but says that glitch could have made his search a whole lot tougher.

“Something of that sort, if the information were disseminated elsewhere, it could cause a lot of damage,” Rothe said.

The Department of Labor said the mistaken information does not affect the amount of overpayment or anything else about the claim.

It also said information about a claimant is not released without their permission.

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