We know this work has taken longer to complete than any of us would like. Most of the delay was caused by the complexity of the federal provisions that relieve charges. We have now applied all available federal and state relief to your account. The work we have done has resulted in much lower bills than would have otherwise occurred.
We will officially resume normal billing in April 2022
Congress authorized federal funding to reimburse states for certain unemployment costs during the pandemic. Under Minnesota law, employers are not required to repay any unemployment benefit charges that the federal government has already reimbursed.
This federal financial relief came with a series of unique requirements that were challenging to implement. In the 85-year history of the UI program, we have never had to relieve employer charges at this scale or level of complexity. We appreciate your patience as we adapted our accounting systems to ensure this federal financial relief was applied correctly.
We have applied federal financial relief to reimbursing employer accounts for both 2020 and 2021. This is how federal law provided that this relief could be applied:
Relief of charges under these federal provisions occurred even when the employee left your employment prior to the pandemic or during the pandemic but not because of the pandemic.
After we removed charges under the federal provisions above, we reviewed all the records submitted by you and your former employees to determine if some of the remaining charges to your account could be relieved.
Under Minnesota law, a reimbursing employer may be relieved of benefit charges when:
Even with the relief of charges that have taken place due to federal reimbursements and under state law, you may still have at least partial charges that have accrued to your account that you will ultimately have to pay. Why might that happen?
Our approach to adjusting benefit charges gives us a very high level of confidence in the calculation of your amount due. However, we know the pandemic created some unusual situations and we also want to give you an opportunity to tell us about something you think we might have missed.
Yes. Though formal billing notices were not sent while we completed adjustments to charges, reimbursing employers could always pay the amount due if they wished to. About a quarter of all reimbursing employers made payments throughout the pandemic based on the amount due inside their online account.
Federal financial relief followed the rules above and was ultimately mathematical. Relief of charges under the state provisions were based on information your former employee provided and information that you provided after we notified you that the former employee applied for unemployment benefits.
No. Federal benefits were paid for out of federal funds and did not get charged to your UI account.
No. We have removed any charges that might be related to an identity theft case.
If your current balance is a negative number, it means you have paid more than the amount that has been charged to your account. Some employers made payments before we had adjusted all of their charges. As a result, these employers have a credit.
Your current amount due that is viewable online reflects all transactions and adjustments that occurred after this letter was sent. The amount shown in your online account is always the most up to date.
No. charge adjustments can only be made in accordance with state and federal law. There is no state or federal law that would allow us to remove all charges that occurred during the pandemic.
It is not unusual for the charge amount for some reimbursing employers to be higher than usual even with all the adjustments. There are number of reasons for this, but primarily it is because your former employees experienced more unemployment and longer spells of unemployment during the pandemic. Remember too that we have delayed billing until all the adjustments to charges could be made. The current amount due reflects the entire period of the pandemic rather than just the usual three months.
An in-depth review of your charges for a particular employee may reduce your charges, but it may also increase the charges to your account. Our responsibility is to properly assign charges in accordance with state and federal laws.
Different employers and different industries were affected differently by the pandemic. Many employers that never closed and never reduced operations saw more benefit charges accrue to their account for the reasons you describe. In these cases, most of your relief of charges came through the federal reimbursements that Congress authorized. You may not have been eligible for very much relief of charges under state laws.
