When Pennsylvania officials rolled out a system to prevent county prison inmates from wrongly collecting unemployment compensation, they estimated it could possibly save $12 million a year.

Instead, the program saved more than half that much in January alone — its first full month statewide, said Sara Goulet, a Pennsylvania Department of Labor & Industry spokeswoman.

The department based its savings estimates on the average length of time someone collects unemployment (18 weeks) and the average weekly compensation ($344), Goulet said.

"So we estimate for every 1,000 payments that are stopped, we save around $6 million," she said Monday.

In January, 1,089 inmates of county prisons across the state fraudulently tried to collect unemployment, she said.

Because the program is new, the department hasn't developed the ability to break the data down by county, Goulet said.

The program works by entering a new inmate's name into the Pennsylvania Justice Network, an online conduit of sorts for law enforcement and public safety officials to share information. The inmate's name is checked against unemployment rolls and once the information is verified, the inmate's name is removed from the rolls.

The Lancaster County Prison is part of the new program, but prison officials don't have to do anything — the process is automatic, according to Dan Egan, a spokesman for JNET.

Lancaster's warden, Dennis Molyneaux, said the prison wouldn't know whether someone was collecting unemployment because it's done by direct deposit.

When Molyneaux was deputy warden at Montgomery County's prison, he said, inmates would sometimes get unemployment checks by mail, which officials would return.

But Lancaster staff had no recent memory of that happening, he said.

Lancaster's prison does have an agreement with the federal government to provide information on new inmates that's cross-referenced to see if anyone is wrongfully collecting Social Security benefits, he said.

The county gets a small amount of money representing a share of the halted benefits. Last month, it was $4,200, Molyneaux said.

The Labor & Industry and JNET program began after Labor & Industry Secretary Julia Hearthway created the "office of integrity" in 2011 to look for ways to ferret out fraud and abuse, Goulet said.

The agencies paired up and developed the system, which was tested in Philadelphia starting in May. From then until the end of the year, 1,162 inmates trying to collect claims were identified, Goulet said.

A similar program has been around in state prisons since about 1996, but those inmates are more likely to already have been removed from the unemployment rolls.

Labor & Industry gets perhaps 20 hits a year indicating a state inmate is wrongfully collecting unemployment.

Egan said county prisons have been providing JNET inmate information since the late 1990s, but it wasn't until a newer reporting system was put in place in 2008 that the unemployment cross-match system was possible.

And technology designed to make dealing with unemployment easier for claimants may have unintentionally made it easier for cheats.

Claimants used to have report to unemployment centers in person, but for years, they've been able to check in by phone.

And in late 2007, Labor & Industry began direct deposit. So while illegal, an inmate could easily have someone else make the call for them.

"It's the irony of the technology," Goulet said.
dnephin@lnpnews.com