My brother works for a restaurant and had same problm with tips getting stolen but he just quit instead of getting fired. ESD denied him because quitting is different I guess? So maybe youre in a better position since they fired you. But I think its crazy how long they make people wait while bills still need to be paid! The whole system is messed up if you ask me.

Has ANYONE from ESD actually contacted you yet for your side of the story??? I'm on week 6 now of adjudication and literally no one has called me or sent me any messages asking for my version of events. How are they even making decisions if they don't talk to both sides?!?

To properly address your overpayment and protect your tax refund, follow these steps: 1. Log into your eServices account at secure.esd.wa.gov 2. Navigate to the "Overpayment" section 3. Select "Set up payment plan" 4. Choose a monthly amount you can afford (even $20-30/month is acceptable) 5. Make sure you make the first payment immediately As long as you have an active payment plan and are making payments, ESD won't refer your debt to collections or the Treasury Offset Program. The key is taking action before the 30-day response window expires. Also, check if the overpayment is classified as "fraudulent" or "non-fraudulent" - if it's just a simple reporting error, it should be non-fraudulent which gives you more flexible repayment options.

Make sure to keep all documentation too! I had a payment plan that somehow got "lost" in their system and they still tried to take my refund even though I had been making payments. I had to send them copies of my bank statements showing the payments to get it straightened out. Their record-keeping isn't always great.

Don't expect anything to happen QUICKLY with ESD! Even if you're 100% eligible, if your claim hits adjudication, they'll make you WAIT and WAIT while they "review" your case. Meanwhile your landlord doesn't care about ESD's timeline!!! The whole system is broken!

One last thing to check: look at your monetary determination letter (should be in your eServices account). This shows your benefit year end date. As long as you're within your benefit year, have available benefit weeks remaining, and haven't earned wages that would establish a new claim, your benefits should continue at the previously established weekly benefit amount after reporting the brief employment period.

UPDATE: Finally managed to speak with an ESD agent! Turns out this was exactly what someone mentioned above - they were counting my final paycheck + vacation payout as "unreported earnings" even though I DID report it. The agent found my original reports and has submitted a correction to remove the overpayment completely. She said the system sometimes flags these automatically during audits and human review is needed to fix it. Such a relief! She also said they're sending these waiver emails proactively when their system detects possible errors like this. Thanks everyone for the help and advice!

This happened to my cousin too! He never even knew about an overpayment until he got the waiver email. Turns out they had him confused with someone with a similar name. The whole system is such a mess these days.

I hate to say this but you might need to talk to a lawyer who specializes in unemployment issues. I know it's expensive, but when you're facing $22k in repayments, it might be worth it. The Legal Aid office sometimes offers free consultations for these cases.

If you go the appeal route, make sure to clearly explain how you calculated your weekly income from your biweekly payments. The key issue will be whether you properly reported your work hours and earnings each week, even if the actual payment was biweekly. For example, if you earned $1600 biweekly for 80 hours of work, ESD would expect you to report $800 for each week (40 hours). If you reported the full $1600 only on the weeks you received payment, that would trigger an overpayment determination because it would appear you weren't reporting income for the alternate weeks. The good news is that if this was an honest misunderstanding about reporting requirements rather than intentional fraud, you have a much better chance of getting the overpayment reduced or the penalties waived.