Officials at the Colorado Department of Labor and Employment have been purging fraudulent claim numbers from data reported to the public, which is good news that the new unemployment claims aren’t as high as originally thought.

But there’s bad news in the fact thieves are still trying to game the system and have succeeded in stealing $10 million in fraudulent claims, according to updated figures released Thursday.

“We prefer to focus on the fraud we’ve prevented,” said Spokeswoman Cher Haavind. “We’ve stopped more than $7 billion in fraudulent payments from going out.”

The battle against fraudulent claims – which shot up significantly after the Pandemic Unemployment Assistance benefits for gig and contract workers ran out Dec. 26 – carries on against the backdrop of the CDLE Sunday implementing new, cloud-based technology to better handle distribution payments.

“We’re walking a tightrope here,” said Joe Barela, Executive Director, at a press conference Thursday. “We want to disperse these benefits as soon as possible, but we don’t want to send funds to fraudulent claims.”

Those fraudulent claims inflated unemployment claim numbers for the past three weeks, sometimes as high as 39 percent.

The department also released the latest unemployment claims figures Thursday: 14,123 regular initial unemployment claims were filed the week ending Jan. 9. That’s a significant drop (44%) from the 25,178 initial claims filed the week ending Jan. 2 – but those Jan. 2 numbers were initially reported at 41,439. That means 16,261 fraudulent claims were filed that week.

The new distribution system’s technology, installed by vendor Deloitte, will help streamline the process and reduce those fraudulent claims, officials said Thursday.

Barela said they got final guidance from the U.S. Department of Labor Friday on regulations to distribute federal benefits for PUA claims. That guidance includes a new identification verification system called ID ME, which is also used by 27 other states.

“We were not able to move forward to the next phase (PUA claims distribution) without that ID ME vendor in place,” Haavind said. “We can probably start processing those claims in 1-2 weeks, if not sooner. It could be in the next few days.”

The new system, dubbed MyUI+, replaces both systems the CDLE used in 2020: the old mainframe legacy system MyUI and the new system modified in April to handle PUA and Pandemic Emergency Unemployment Compensation (PEUC) claims.

Phil Spesshardt, Benefit Services Branch Manager, said the new MyUI+ system will allow for quicker flagging of potentially fraudulent claims.

“The UI+ system is real time. There was a lag in the old system,” Spesshardt said, noting employees had to follow up with each potentially fraudulent claim. The new technology automates that process.

“This is not to say it won’t catch up innocent people,” he said. “But in 1-2 weeks we’ll know the total number of people caught up in those fraud holds.”

Barela tossed out some numbers for the new system’s first five days in operation:

• 14,000 new claims created
• “Just under” 80,000 claim requests received
• 185,000 logged into the new system in the first 72 hours
• $18 million in claims paid
• Average wait time for call center down to 30 minutes (from 45 minutes)
• Call center received 33,000 calls

The webpage is www.coloradoui.gov and a third-party call center has been opened to field questions Monday through Friday, 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. at 303-536-5615.