If you find yourself in the position of needing to file for unemployment insurance from the state of Texas, be sure you go to the Texas Workforce Commission page to do it. Do not go anywhere else.
As if it’s not bad enough to lose a job, some people trying to apply for unemployment benefits with the state have instead mistakenly filed their personal information with privately run Web sites.
“What you’ve got is a private site that may be legal but is trying to get information from people so they can sell those lists to others for possible financial gain,” said Texas Workforce Commission Chairman Tom Pauken. “They are just taking advantage of the situation. There’s always somebody trying to figure out an angle.”
The state commission isn’t alleging any laws have been broken, he said, but people may be confused by official-looking private sites if they aren’t familiar with the system.
Just this week, the three-member commission decided to allow a woman to backdate her jobless claim after she initially provided information to a site called www.The UnemploymentAdvisor.com, and began an e-mail correspondence with it.
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The Unemployment Advisor doesn’t appear to charge a fee to those who provide information; instead it offers advice on maximizing the chance of getting claims approved to those who provide their information.
The state agency said some businesses may try to charge a fee to file claims. Filing for benefits through the Texas Workforce Commission is free.
It’s not really clear what that site might be doing, since presumably it has a profit motive in mind. I suppose this woman and anyone like her will start to receive a lot of unwanted mail now.
Besides warning jobless Texans to be sure they file in the right place, Pauken said the commission is looking into contacting Google to see whether the search engine can help make sure this type of site “doesn’t bubble up to the top” in searches.
In a Web search Wednesday for “unemployment benefits,” www.TheUnemployment Advisor.com was the second site to pop up.
The first was for another private company.
The good news is that a Google search for unemployment benefits Texas, the TWC page came up first. When I searched simply for unemployment benefits, sites for other states filled the first result page, but atop them was a sponsored link to a private company that claimed to represent Texas and exhorted me to “Submit an Application online today. Visit our site. Get your benefits!” Be careful where you click, that’s all I can say.