Client brings employee in says 'he has problem with unemployment'
 

ok, what's the problem?

'I told unemployment I made 1,000 during this period but they say I made 2,600 and I've defrauded them'.

ok, mr client did you issue those paychecks?

yes.

so.....what exactly is the problem? you defrauded them mr employee.

'but I told them I made less...now i'll have to pay it back'

I don't follow...what exactly are you here for?



I think this guy actually wanted me to change something to cover him so he didn't have to pay the money back! I looked at my client while the guy was standing next to him and said 'the next time somebody asks you to 'help' with unemployment you tell them to go fly a kite'.

you know what this employee will say to his friends? 'oh woe is me I got screwed by the state and my boss'.

this is the prototypical obamacare credit recipient. prototypical state aid recipient.

i'm charging him an extra $100 for bringing that ****bag into my office and wasting 10 minutes of my time.

mods my mistake on OT...can you please move this to PARF?

If you think that sort of behavior has only been around for 8 years I suspect you are mistaken.
Then you are suggesting a man who has managed to avoid paying taxes for over a decade is the guiding light, I don't follow your logic.
Best
Les

where exactly did I say this was new as of 8 years ago?

we need to get people off welfare and into jobs. that is some sweet music.

I agree - anything that we ( taxpayers) subsidize via our Govt - will grow like weeds thus creating a part of society that not only feels entitled, but also entitled to 'work' the system. I don't think this is Parf-y as Barettafan is reporting an actual event.

This is basically theft by deception and it's been around since cavemen traded animal skins. If you think ANY president of the United States is going to stop it you are delusional.

I think a president who is not afraid to say welfare should be reduced is a great step in the right direction.

It would be very easy to edit out that sentence. You have a legitimate complaint that doesn't need to be PARF.

Just under half of people on welfare are employed.

The other ~half of recipients is made up of kids, the elderly and disabled who can't work but are in a family unit where at least one person does work.

~13% of welfare recipients are in family units where no one works. Part of that is absolutely mooches but part is also those who can't find employment.

It's not sloth that creates welfare, it's low paying jobs.

A few years back was having a conversation with my BIL / SIL. They were complaining that their nanny was ripping off the government by receiving public assistance for her daughter.

They were of the opinion that the $45,000 they paid her a year was sufficient for a family of two.

I agreed and asked how with that salary she possibly qualified?

"We pay her in cash"

But you are her full time employer, you issue a W-2, it's got to match up with what she reports on her taxes right?

"She's illegal, no SS# so no"

Ahh, I see, you hire illegals, who you pay in cash so you can avoid your legal obligation as her employer to contribute to unemployment, medical and SS contributions but you are upset that SHE is cheating the system?

They did not seem to see how they were doing anything wrong. Mind you, she is in HR and owns her own recruiting firm and he is a CFO so they are fully aware of their legal obligations when it comes to employment.

For the record, he voted Trump.

sure enough...done!



welfare fraud is a massive problem in the US. in resort areas welfare enables employers to keep labor around during the offseason without paying them. not sure I care for the situation but it's real and we are living with it.

Sloth results in low-paying jobs.

When I was young, people told me to pay attention in school and work hard to get good grades so I could go to college and get a good education and get a good (high paying) job.
The people who told me that were teachers, councilors, parents, grand parents, all the grown-ups I knew said the same thing.
So I listened to that message and did what i was told and it WORKED!
I could have taken the EASY route and kicked back and smoked dope and learned nothing, but I did not.
So my hard work was rewarded.

I do not believe that message was a SECRET.
I do not believe that message was some sort of PRIVILEGE.

And i do not believe that everyone who listened to that message should be punished because of it.
I do not believe that everyone who DID NOT listen to that message should be rewarded.

Those who did the right thing should not have to pay those who did the wrong thing.

We should all be equal on the starting line, not on the finish line.

Our decisions have consequences.
If we remove the consequences for bad decisions, we remove the incentives to do the right things.
And we get MORE BAD DECISIONS!

Good intentions too often provide bad results.


BTW, what are your SIL and BIL's names?
I hear there's a reward system for turning in people who do stuff like that....... :cool:

Those would be H-2 visa holders who are not in a class that is eligible for welfare benefits.

But you have a point, employers, just like illegal migrant workers it's employers who hire them and create the economic conditions that attracts them.

If someone keeps stabbing you with a knife do you just keep stitching up the wounds or do you take away the ****ing knife?

You assume that everyone who has not done as well in life is the result of sloth and that everyone who has succeeded has done so due to hard work.

While in some instances that is true it's not how life works for everyone.

And I would have probably dropped dime myself if it were provable.:D

Are you hallucinating, who are you addressing, is Harvey sitting next to you drinking Rye and Soda or something, and you are talking to him?

I have a few employee stories. One gal, who I had really taken care of, gave her money when she was strapped for cash, let her go anytime she needed to take care of her kids. She got pregnant, went on maternity leave 5 months before she was due. Because I am a right kind of guy, I carried her and her family's health insurance the entire time. The day she was supposed to come back, no call, no show. Finally got a hold of her, and she gave me another day she was coming back. No call, no show again, and she did not answer her phone or return calls. Got a letter from the state unemployment office, asking for a little report about her employment. Turns out, if you abandon your job, which she did, you are not eligible for unemployment. Heard from her one last time. She left a very nasty message on the voice mail about me lying to the unemployment people about her never working here.

First job out of school for her, here for 4 years, so pretty much her only job. She can't very well use me as a reference, but there are those that would use me as a reference anyway.

That's a very good point. I often find people's morality and fair mindedness goes out the window if they see personal economic gain in their equation.....................

No it's not. Do you even know what "prototypical" means? This kind of behavior started a lot longer than 8 years ago. The ACA has nothing to do with it.
And it's still PARF bait, even with your edit.

No easy answers.

A society as wealthy as America should have a safety net for those that fall through the cracks.
But how do we prevent that short-term safety net from turning into a long-term hammock?
There will always be those who will bend the rules to benefit themselves at the expense of others.

No easy answers.

We have one Dan. It is just that too many think of it as a hammock, rather than a net.

Exactly my point.

How do we help those that truly need help, but give the moochers a kick in the butt?

One way would be to more closely monitor each individual case to help ferret out the career deadbeats and insist on some accountability. This would cost money to hire more case workers, but rather than spend it up front to reduce costs down the line (and create jobs at the same time), the system seems more content to just throw money at the problem after it's already manifested itself. It's like continuing to feed the pigeons, then wondering why there are so many of 'em around.

It would be doable enough, but there is not any will to do anything.

There always have been and always will be those who will bend the rules to benefit themselves at the expense of others. It happens at all levels of the economic spectrum. And if bending the rules isn't enough, the politically savvy just have the rules rewritten. To blame it on any one group is ignore reality.
The only answer is to change human nature. Good luck with that.

The basic issue, many people who would never steal or defraud a person, have no issue with stealing from a government. I saw/see this all the time in the Socialist or Social Democracy countries. In Mexico, about 25% of electricity is not metered because you can pay an electrician a few dollars to create a bypass around the meter. My Spanish friends tell me that people that cheat on welfare or the government are considered "clever" not as cheats.

disagree. we all know who the cheats are and could easily be far more efficient at dealing with it. nobody wants to take the heat for doing it.

Apparently not.

Enlighten us.

If it would not violate patient confidentiality, I could probably come up with 20-30 off the top of my head

The people we have put in charge of "monitoring" often take joy in "helping the unfortunate" by "sticking it to the wealthy". In other words, they feel that helping people, even people bending the rules almost to the point of breaking, is doing society good because it is redistributing wealth.

Maybe. It would take an evaluation of what is more cost effective, handing out money to people knowing a percentage of them is gaming the system, or hiring more case workers to minimize cheating. Maybe the answer is to "drain the swamp" by hiring welfare cheats to run the welfare department. Our government seems to think that's the answer to cleaning up financial industry.

true.

I have had conversations with unemployment office employees who argued that the employee who stole company data, was documented playing video games 6 hours a day while at work and who cussed out the staff when fired was deserving of unemployment.

inmates running the prison.

Twenty plus years ago I dealt with employers and HR people on a regular basis when working with the Welfare to Work program as part of my job at the time. I think it would be an eye opener for anybody to work with the welfare crowd. Part of my job was to get them educated, vocationally trained, and find jobs for them. Like one of the young university grads working for the company handling the local welfare contract said, " When I was at the university, they told me 95% of these people want to work. Now that I'm working in the field, I realize 95% of them don't want to work." I used to get calls from HR & employers asking about someone who didn't show or call for an interview. When I talked to the person asking why they didn't show up or call, his/her answer most of the time was, "I had things to do." I can also say case workers' jobs are to hand out money. Think about it. If they don't or if the agency doesn't hand it out & increase clients, there is no job or agency. The entitlement mentality is a large part of unemployment scams and the feelings people are entitled to things they are not.

The answer is basic income, but many folks who are mainly on the right side of the political spectrum don't see it as the answer.

Simply put, basic income does away with all forms of government financial support like welfare, food stamps, unemployment, subsidized housing, etc. and it gets rid of the associated government agencies that run all these programs.

It works like this: every adult citizen is guaranteed a certain basic income, let's say $20,000.

For every dollar they earn they lose 50 cents of that $20,000 so if they make $20,000 in income they still get $10,000 of the basic income. If they earn $40K or more they get zero basic income.

So there's incentive to work if you don't want be poor or if you can live on $20K, fine just don't ***** about being poor.

Of course folks with take money under the table to skirt this but that will happen anywhere there's an incentive to under report income like folks do with taxes.

And who will pay for that? And then there will be exceptions. And people to administer the exceptions. And people to monitor the people who administer the exceptions. It's just another entitlement.

Where's the incentive to work? Why should I get a job, when I get 20K just for breathing? And as Legion asked, who's going to pay for this?

The objective is not necessarily incentivize work, rather it's to get rid of all that costly overhead in supporting the slackers. The premise being far more money is spent on overhead for the slackers, it would be cheaper simply to give them a basic income and forgo all the overhead in support. Such however would compromise the purpose behind the overhead in supporting the slackers, I wouldn't put it past the government to attempt a basic income PLUS retain all the overhear support for the slackers.

Finland is experimenting with this concept. Other localities are as well. Somewhere in Brazil and somewhere in Canada comes to mind. That is to say small populations. I've no idea if such could be scaled to a country of our size.

What if we gave the slacker overhead basic?

IF you must put people on "basic", make it like in the Novel "The Expanse".

The same argument could be then made for why try to get promoted, or why switch employers for a better gig, or any of the other myriad reasons people who started out making $20k did what they did to make more.

Disagree. When you're working, and you see that it's not too hard to get ahead by applying yourself a little more, you can leverage your career by switching employers, taking on more responsibility, and getting promotions. Work becomes natural.

When you're sitting on your dead ass collecting 20K, where's the motivation to get a job and cut into your days of leisure? And if you did get a job, the more you worked, the less you'd be paid for breathing. Some people are professional slackers.

OK so I'll take a swing at this having direct knowledge of someone who is gaming the system at a place where my wife was this persons manager and did payroll. employee said to her basically that you are supposed to get WIC and the employee saying this admitted to getting WIC. Both this employee and her baby daddy not married so they could game the system both fully gainfully employed at a large hospital making very good money.

Stomachmonkey - your statement that low paying jobs not sloth (being lazy) is the issue, how I ask? Is it the fault of the employer they are not paying someone enough to cook the fries or burgers at a fast food place as an example? How much should they pay? Oh wait I know your answer on this - a living wage.... Where exactly is it written that minimum wage is supposed to support a family 4? maybe people should act their wage

How do we keep people from feeling entitled to a government funded program? Easy, get rid of the program. Let charities and churches take over helping those in need, make a personal action for someone in need to go ask someone else for help instead of a nameless bureaucrat in a cube in an office where money just shows up in the mail box because the person in need filled out a form to get money from a magic pot in the sky at the unicorn farm.

We have mistaken being nice for being kind. It's always easy to be nice, it always feels good to be nice. Nice is the best intentions. Being kind does not always feel good and it is not always easy to be kind. Case in point if you are a dog lover and have to put down your dog for some reason, nothing nice about that at all but it is kind.

The motivation is to not be poor.

Same motivation that drives everyone who improves their situation.

Some will still be slackers, that'll never change.