It seems that due to multiple clerical and administrative errors, the state of Colorado paid out more than $128 million in error to people on unemployment in 2011 and now it wants the money back in 2012. Very little of that was fraud and that is what makes this high number so astounding.

If you did get paid in error, you WILL owe the money back to the state and it doesn’t matter whether you have spent it already. That is, if your name comes up as one of the ones who got paid in error. Colorado does not forgive this kind of debt and it seems the government doesn’t care that it was there fault in the first place for making these erroneous payments.

This is all one big mess and now some people are going to have to try to prove that the payments they received were in fact justified. For anyone who got paid and shouldn’t have, they can appeal but right now nothing is being addressed in a timely manner.

So much of our government, both state and national, is plain incompetent. We have a jobs emergency across the country and debt so high that it threatens our whole way of life. But everywhere you turn, government keeps getting in the way and doing stupid things.

Then we have state workers such as these in Colorado who are making millions of dollars in overpayments for unemployment benefits and now the state has to try to collect the money back. Things just keep getting worse and it should be clear by now that more government is NOT the answer.