Any advice? Huge pua/ui mess
Does anyone have advice on what my next steps should be for this? Here’s my situation below (sorry for length but I feel I need to describe my entire situation)
I was a gig worker doing delivery then when Covid started, I started losing income and not being able to get on the schedule as often. So I applied for pua. I was still trying to work but making next to nothing, but I did always report anything I made on my weekly verifications. I followed up with a call and talked to an agent to make sure I was doing things right. This same agent offered to set up my income information as well.
I’ve been receiving pua from April of 2020 to July of 2021 until they told me I was supposed to have been on peuc all along and switched me to regular ui, I then was on regular UI until it ended. There was a lot of back and forth before I got paid because pua was telling me I was supposed to be with them and ui was telling me the opposite. The reason they said I should be on regular ui first was that I had an existing ui claim from 2019, but I did not think that claim mattered anymore since it was for a W-2 job I had that closed down and I received unemployment for a couple months until I became a gig worker and I had last received a payment from it over a year before filing for pua.
I first was hit with an overpayment balance of around $4k, noting that it was because my income was improperly put in (the agent used my gross instead of net for self employed) resulting in me receiving a higher weekly payment than I should have. I emailed pua about this as well as called and voiced my concerns because it seemed too high of an amount but was told it was fine until they hit me with the overpayment. Then a few months later they hit me with another op of around $1600 for apparently paying me for the same 2 weeks twice (once on pua end and once on ui) when I switched over.
I appealed the $4k, I then received an overpayment waiver and I filled that out. Then I called about the additions $1600 and they said if the waiver was approved any new overpayments should be added to it.
It’s been since this past July and my op waiver is still pending, so I contacted senator fedoras office per a lot of peoples advice and they said they would put in an inquiry and someone from odjfs was assigned to my case. About a week later, I check today and now I have a new determination of “ineligible” for the entire time I received pua because they are saying I should have received the peuc first. And they updated my op balance from $6k to over $24k.
If anyone stayed until the end of this, any advice would be great. I’m beyond stressed over this and in the last year and a half I have had to file for bankruptcy, sell my home because my husband has a spinal issue that has prevented him from working for the past two years and I’ve had my mother, father, brother, uncle, aunt and 3 close friends all pass away during this time. Having this over my head is pushing me further into depression.