Nearly $7 million in unemployment benefits were issued to Alabama inmates and dead people during a two-year period that includes the pandemic, according to a report by a state agency.

The Alabama Department of Labor had inadequate verification procedures that failed to flag fraudulent claims, the report by the state Department of Examiners of Public Accounts found.

In a statement to AL.com, Labor Department Secretary Fitzgerald Washington disputed the report, claiming it “contains multiple inaccuracies and misleading data.”

Washington also said his agency asked for a meeting with the Board of Examiners to review the report and make corrections, adding that the department was given less than 24 hours’ notice before the report was published Jan. 13.

“Among other issues, the report fails to note that its findings of inaccurate payments to those who are incarcerated or deceased represent less than half of a percentage point of the entirety of benefits distributed (.38%, to be exact). With national reports of historic unemployment fraud, and despite the tsunami of claims ADOL received, with reduced staff and reduced budgets, less than half of a percentage point of inaccurate payments is actually quite impressive,” the secretary said.

“While any amount of fraud is undesirable, the simple fact of the matter is that it exists, and it exists in forms and volumes never before seen and are the direct result of the overwhelming volume of claims filed during the pandemic,” Fitzgerald’s statement continued. :”Focusing on less than one half of one percentage point of incorrect payments amid these circumstances is disingenuous and misleading and discounts the hard work that ADOL staff has undertaken these past few years to mitigate loss and distribute benefits to those who are truly eligible to receive them.”

The Department of Examiners of Public Accounts conceded that the Labor Department was working under increased demand during the pandemic and that the amount of improper payments fell precipitously after Alabama withdrew from federal pandemic unemployment assistance on June 19, 2021.

But it also noted the agency’s verification problems continued despite the program ending.

From Oct. 1, 2020 through Sept. 30, 2022, the Labor Department issued more than 24,000 benefit payments to 994 state inmates totaling $5.3 million, according to the report.

When Alabama’s participation with federal pandemic unemployment assistance ended, 10 or fewer state inmates were received unemployment payments, the report found.

The Labor Department did not have proper procedures to identify whether a claimant was in custody of the state, the report concluded. And when the agency did, according to the report, the inmate was still paid in some cases.

“A sample of 112 individuals identified as inmates was traced to records maintained by ADOL to determine if the verification process had detected that payments were being made to incarcerated individuals. We found that only two of the records had notations of the claimant being incarcerated. We found that 17 individuals identified in ADOC custody were paid throughout both fiscal years,” the report stated.

Another 302 claimants who used the identities of dead people received 6,345 unemployment checks totaling $1.35 million, according to the report. The dates of death ranged from February 1943 to May 2022.

Payments were also made to several duplicate mailing addresses, including 119 claimants who gave the address of a Maryland apartment building and 111 who claimed to reside in a Texas commercial building, the report found.

“ADOL’s verification processes did not alert or flag that 119 claimants were receiving mail to the same apartment in Maryland or 111 claimants to a commercial building in Texas,” the report went on to say.

The Department of Examiners of Public Accounts did not say the amount of unemployment benefits given to these claimants.