In any unemployment insurance system in the country, if you report your earnings for the week correctly, and this is gross earnings for the Sunday through Saturday after they were worked, not when they were paid, and they are more than your weekly benefit amount would have been for Unemployment insurance, this will immediately stop your claim until you take steps to re-open it.
If you were working somewhere and you report some earnings for the week, though they are lesser than the fully weekly amount you would have drawn in benefits, your benefits will be lowered, but you will still be able to draw part of your benefits.
There is no program that will enable you to continue certifying and report all you made in gross earnings, and not affect your claim one itty bit. This is not some person sitting around with a pen and paper doing these calculations, this is how the whole situation is set up. If you did report your earnings, there is a strong possibility you did it incorrectly, using the date when you were paid instead of the week you worked, or reporting net instead of gross earnings.
They'll be able to tell exactly what the employer's records show you worked. When you say they said you started a week before you did, it sounds like a reporting error on your part, you waited to report the week until you were paid for it, not when you worked it.
This is something you and the unemployment overpayment system will be able to work out. You may or may not have reported your wages correctly, providing you were reporting wages, which is hard to tell from what we are getting here. You may not be overpaid for every week. But you must work it out with them. You can't just slide out of the whole thing.
No one who knows how the system works would tell you to keep filing for weeks but keep reporting your earnings until you are sure the job will work out if this were a full time job. Because if it is a full time job, it will stop your claim the first time you report your earnings and they're more than a weekly unemployment check.
If your drawing of unemployment benefits cross matches with an employer's reporting that you worked and received wages from their company during that week, the system picks this out and spits out a calculation of how much you received while you were working, and whether or not this was full or partial payment for the week, based on your work, whether any work wages were reported, and how many weeks this happened.
I am rather sure that the OP had this whole process explained to them five or six times when their claim was beginning, and was told how to report the weeks every time they did file for a week. Each time they filled out a weekly certification they were asked to report those wages.
If they did it correctly there is no way, even if they are working very part time, that the amount they reported would not have at least affected the amount of the unemployment claim weekly benefit. If they had reported it correctly, the same way the employer has reported they paid you, there would be no overpayment showing now. It is very appropriate for a person who is only working part time and is making less a week in gross wages than they could have drawn in a full week of unemployment insurance benefit to keep filing. The 90 day probationary period, whether or not the job was going to "work out" would have nothing to do with this. They could legitimately do it for as long as they had money left in their unemployment claim to draw out.
Even if one person who worked there, who didn't understand the system actually did tell them(ask them) to keep sending in and filing for unemployment weeks until they had passed their 90 day probation period, this would not have kept the system from stopping the claim or making the necessary calculations if they did it correctly and they would NOT be overpaid now.
If the person told them to keep filing and NOT to report their wages or told them to report the wages incorrectly, which I still find very very hard to believe, it does NOT excuse the OP for not doing so, because as I said, this person is wrong, and is obviously in conflict with every other single thing this claimant has been told or signed or verified they read since they began filing the claim.
Speak to the unemployment overpayment system. Try out your story about how you were told. As I told someone on another thread, it doesn't make any difference what you present as your reason. When they tell you what you are supposed to do many many times, and have you sign statements and they give you information, and you verify your earnings record each time you make a certification, you are supposed to grasp the concept that you're supposed to tell them. And if you do not, or if you report the wages incorrectly, you are still overpaid. It's like pregnancy. You either were, or were not overpaid. It's not a judgment call.
If your employer overpays you because they made a mistake, it's still not automatically your money. It is the same with the unemployment system. In this situation, I do not believe the system made any mistakes. Regardless of what someone may have told you to do, there is some reason you were overpaid, and they'll see it and they'll know exactly how much it is, and you owe it back.
If you are in severe financial hardship and you feel unable to pay it back right now, you may be able to ask for a waiver of the overpayment, or get them to postpone it until later. But you need to talk to them, and if you knew how the system was set up you'd think very hard about telling them any fish stories about how the overpayment happened as a misunderstanding. But no matter what you tell them, it's still there.
If the claimant talked to the fraud unit and had the person from the office with them who was swearing they actually told him that, you know, asked him to keep filing until he knew the job was going to work out, or reporting his wages incorrectly, he's still overpaid.
