Friday, October 12, 2012

"I'm in jail; pay me..."

No, "I" am not in jail, but FirstElectricNewspaper.com is reporting this morning that eight inmates of the McHenry County Jail scarfed up $33,000 in unemployment benefits from the Great State of Illinois.

With the massive power of the internet, how does this happen? Did no one suspect that some criminal might be collecting unemployment benefits?

And why wasn't there, before now, an interface between County Jail records and IDES?

Not just for this $33,000 but for the $2,000,000 paid as unemployment benefits to inmates in the state.

Undersheriff Andy Zinke explains it: "there's no mechanism to report it."

Jail records are public information, easily accessible from the internet. IDES could certainly check. How public are IDES records? Are State of Illinois unemployment payment records open to the public?

What if the counties fed the names of inmates weekly to a database, and then IDES made the comparison? A $35,000/year clerk or $100 worth of computer time would find the matches. It doesn't take a super-nerd to figure that out.

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