Unemployment Insurance Appeal - NY

[marley123]

What is the name of your state (only U.S. law)? New York
We had to close our mom and pop restaurant this June 2009. My husband and I applied for unemployment and we were denied. The decision said that we voluntarily quit. We closed the restaurant voluntarily b/c since September 08 our sales have been decreasing. Our lease rent up in February 09. We did manage to negotiate a rent decrease but in return the landlord took our security deposit so now we can not look else where. Also, since the landlord did this we are not on good terms with him. The business was not making any profit, but we did manage to pay all the bills on time. However, we decided to shut it down b/c we knew we couldn't keep it up much longer. We didn't want to have to declare bankruptcy and owe people and vendors money so we made the decision to close. We have been paying closing expenses and outstanding vendor bills since June 2009 out of our personal funds because we didn't want to screw the vendors. The unemployment office has seen all of last 3 years financial records. We were questioned initially by the unemployment office on why we did not cut our salary. We explained that we still had personal bills to pay. And frankly, for the job and the hours spent we feel the salary was justified.

Do you think we have a chance at the appeal? Is the appeal solely before the Judge or will the examiner be there also. What do you suggest we need to support our situation? Were we required to cut our salary before closing the business in order to qualify for unemployment?What is the name of your state (only U.S. law)?

 

[pattytx]

Did you pay yourselves a salary, report your wages, and pay UI taxes on them (as the employer)? Or was this a sole proprietorship or partnership?

 

[marley123]

We had a corporation. We paid ourselves a salary, we reported our salary and we paid unemployment taxes as the employer.

 

[commentator]

You said it yourselves. You decided to shut it down. So in effect, you quit yourselves. By your own personal decision. How can you argue with that?

It was yours to make, and you made it. And it doesn't sound as though you exhausted every possible option before you quit. By not running the restaurant into the ground, you made the decision to get out of business before you lost it and to save your credit. I just don't see where you have much of a defense that you HAD to do this when you did.

The valid job related reason to quit your job has to be something pretty extreme, for example, not getting paid. So the fact that you continued to pay yourselves and didn't even consider cutting your salaries, though business was poor, right up untill the business closed (by your decision) does not help your case.

I'm assuming you received an initial decision saying you were not eligible, and you are now appealing this decision? In this case, it will not necessarily be a judge who will be there, it will be an appeals referee. The adjudicator who made the initial decision to deny benefits will not be there. But there will probably be a representative of employer accounts from the state. They do not want to pay you unemployment insurance from the state's trust fund for laying yourself off by choice because profits were down.

 

[marley123]

The Notice of Determination said we quit job "without good cause" for unemployment purposes. What factors would support "good cause"? We paid unemployment taxes for a very long time. The banking crisis hits our restaurant hard since most of our customers were from that industry. It seems like the unemployment system fails small businesses and encourages small business owners to file bankruptcy and screw vendors that provided services in order to qualify for unemployment insurance.