$136M of PUA/FPUC distributed

The CNMI Department of Labor has distributed up to $136 million worth of Pandemic Unemployment Assistance and Federal Pandemic Unemployment Compensation on all three islands, according to Labor Secretary Vicky Benavente.

Speaking at a radio news briefing yesterday, Benavente said that Saipan’s PUA distribution totaled over $108 million while the FPUC totaled over $16 million. On Rota, the PUA amount totaled $5.7 million and FPUC amounted to $2.3 million, while Tinian’s PUA totaled $2.4 million and FPUC totaled $2.5 million, she said.

Additionally, DOL received over 14,000 claims to date, Benavente said. For Saipan, there were 14,230 claim applicants; on Rota, there were 649 claim applicants, and 734 claim applicants on Tinian. Of the 15,703 total applicants, Benavente stated that over 7,000 have already been paid out, and that they have more pending adjudication.

Benavente stated that the last pay date was last Sept. 16 and they are working on applicants that have pay dates of Sept. 22, Sept. 29, and Oct. 6. She said the delay in the payments is due to many applications that were filed with incorrect earnings. Benavente assured that they are working to catch up for the pay dates of Sept. 29, Oct. 6, and Oct. 13. “We do have payment dates issued on the portal, but we want to make sure that each application, as I mentioned, is adjudicated properly,” said Benavente.

Last Oct. 4, DOL announced that they temporarily suspended in-person appointments for its PUA program at the CNMI DOL office from Oct. 15 through Nov. 30. This shutdown was necessary to allow DOL to work on its backlogs on PUA applicants who have not been processed due to errors or incomplete information, to audit overpayments, to conduct appeals, and detection of fraud.

While there have been many distributions, DOL’s Benefit Payment Control Unit has collected over $1.3 million in 349 cases of overpayments. Benavente stated that the result of overpayment includes applicants who misfiled a lump sum, misfiled a payroll protection amount, or whose unemployment was not directly a result of COVID-19, etc.

Benavente said that DOL has intercepted about 60 cases of fraudulent claims that amount to over $1 million, which means that they were able to stop the payment to these 60 cases. Additionally, Benavente says that they have been tracking applications and catching fraud cases that are trying to get PUA/FPUC money through the hiremarianas.com portal.

The most common factor of fraudulent claims is that their mailing addresses are not in the CNMI, but most are somewhere in the United States, Benavente said, adding that DOL has picked up on that, looked into applications, and found that there were no documents submitted such as their identification cards, check stubs, etc., which are red flags for applications. Once DOL sees those red flags, they pull out the application and hold off on any type of payment. There have also been cases such as the recurrence of blocked mailing addresses and with different usernames, where an applicant will try to get paid using different documents but still using the same mailing address that DOL had already blocked, Benavente said.

“We know that these are difficult times, not just in the CNMI, but worldwide and in the United States and so, with tourism being our bread and butter, we are keeping an eye on how our tourism-based economy can pick up and help our people get back into the workforce,” said Benavente.