What are the Elements of an Effective Unemployment Insurance Protest?

Most employers understand that one of the highest costs of doing business is paying for unemployment insurance (UI) for their employees.  As this is a controllable tax, I think it just makes sense to take advantage of the opportunity to fight for every dollar you can.  As a result, I have a bit of a reputation of being "scrappy" when it comes to managing my clients' UI claims.  

Lots of HR professionals can attest to these things I have learned from experience: it takes hard work, an ability to learn from mistakes, and a whole lot of patience to build an effective UI claims/cost management program.  The cornerstone of any UI program is identifying and protesting claims that should not be paid-- and then winning those protests.  The following are a few elements that will make your UI protests more effective and help you to win at a higher rate:

•    Get to know what you don’t know – most employers stumble when protesting UI claims because they do not fully understand how the UI laws in their state work.  Get help!  Contact a professional to help you to better understand the laws in your state and then your protests will be more compelling and will follow the laws.
•    Make sure you meet the timeliness deadlines for protesting – you have a specific deadline for protesting claims which you must meet in order to preserve your right to protest a claim or eligibility determination – miss that deadline and you will be paying for that claim regardless of its validity.  Get to know the requirements of the state(s) in which you operate.
•    Use supporting documentation for your protest – this is your evidence of what happened when the employee separated – it supports your protest.  Many protests will be lost without sufficient documentation of the separation and events leading up to that separation (employee discipline, etc.).  If you improve your employee documentation, you will win more UI protests – yes it can be that simple.
•    Be sure you are using proper protest language – the right words used in your protest can be the difference between winning and losing.  Use the following tips to improve your language in protesting UI claims (remember that this might vary by state).

o   Tell the agency what you want it to do (they won’t guess) – be certain that you said “we protest this claim” somewhere in the statement.

o   Be specific in your charges (do not give a laundry list of offenses) – see some of our other blogs for tips on how to properly do this.

o   Be sure that you are telling them what they need to hear to make the decision (this may take some initial trial and error).

By ensuring that the elements discussed above are utilized in your UI claims protests, you will improve your protest win rate and that should help you to significantly reduce your overall UI costs.  For more information visit us on the web at UnemploymentTracker.com.