Alabama overpaid $160 million in pandemic unemployment and now wants it back.

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Melissa Fass, 35, worked at the store at the Space and Rocket Center before getting laid off in the pandemic. It took her a few months to get her unemployment application approved and she was on assistance for over a year before moving to Florida and starting work as a computer tech.

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Last year she got a letter saying she owed Alabama $1,200. She appealed twice but didn’t hear back. She said she tried calling the department many times. “You could never get through. Every time I try to call it, you just can’t get through,” she said, as she logged in to her account to check on its status. As Fass spoke with AL.com, she noticed that the overpayment amount in her account had increased to $20,000.

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During the pandemic, the federal government paid hundreds of billions of dollars to states to pay people an extra $600 of unemployment money per week. An estimated quarter of Americans were on unemployment at some point in the pandemic, according to The Century Foundation. But because the government’s response was set up so quickly to the crisis created by the pandemic, and because the amount of money given to Americans was unprecedented, state agencies were understaffed, and errors happened more often, said Jenna Gerry, a senior attorney at the National Employment Law Project. “It led to a lot of confusion and mistakes that now are leading to these really harmful overpayment waivers which are asking people to pay back hundreds, thousands of dollars, based on stuff that was not their mistake, (and) really was due to agency error and confusion.”

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Among other concerns raised by Legal Services in the lawsuit against the department is a failure to communicate effectively with beneficiaries about what is going on with their cases. On Monday, Montgomery County Judge James Anderson heard arguments in the case. He is weighing whether to dismiss the suit based on the sovereign immunity rights of Labor Secretary Fitzgerald Washington.

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Edward Terry, 51, drove for Uber in Birmingham when Alabama shutdown in 2020. His customer base disappeared from the streets, and he filed for unemployment. Last year, Terry got a letter from the state saying he owes them $7,299 of those benefits. He sent an appeal and said he hasn’t heard from anyone.

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