NEBRASKA- Since March 2020, Legal Aid of Nebraska has received more than 560 requests for people asking for representation in unemployment cases.

Ann Mangiameli, an attorney with the nonprofit that offers civil legal services for people with limited resources, provided that statistic in a hearing at the State Capitol on Wednesday. Some of those clients had been denied unemployment benefits, she said. Some had received benefits, then were later notified they shouldn’t have been paid — the state had overpaid and wanted its money back.

For her clients who live paycheck to paycheck and work blue-collar jobs, Mangiameli said, a demand to pay back $15,000-$20,000, in some cases, can be devastating. And her clients, she said, hadn’t been adequately notified so they could take advantage of appeals processes.

“Our clients relied on the Department of Labor, when they filed their applications, to properly process their application,” she said. “They waited that five to six months with no income, finally got approved for benefits and finally got paid. The Department of Labor then came back, in many instances, and said, ‘We’ve redetermined, and determined that you should not have been paid that money, please pay us back.’ ”

Members of the Nebraska Legislature’s Business and Labor Committee listened to Mangiameli’s testimony Wednesday, after a briefing from Labor Commissioner John Albin and testimony from a representative of the nonprofit Nebraska Appleseed.

State Sen. Carol Blood of Bellevue pressed Albin for answers regarding overpayments that were discovered amid a tidal wave of people filing for unemployment during the pandemic. Her focus was on instances when people were overpaid because of an agency error, not because of fraud or something they did wrong.

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