A former state contractor has been charged in a $4.6 million scheme to defraud unemployment benefits in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic by falsifying wage records for herself and hundreds of others.
Andrea Wellington, 35, was charged in an indictment made public in U.S. District Court on Friday with 21 counts of wire fraud. Also charged in 14 of the same counts was Randall Easley, 38, whom prosecutors alleged helped Wellington defraud the Illinois Department of Employment Security.
Both defendants were arrested Thursday and pleaded not guilty in a hearing before U.S. Magistrate Judge Beth Jantz, who ordered them released on bond, court records show.
The indictment alleged Wellington was hired by IDES in July 2021 through a contractor — identified as Company B — and assigned as a customer service representative, responsible for handling calls from unemployment insurance applicants, offering solutions, explanations, and “options to address concerns with their applications and claims.”
As part of her job, Wellington was given access to the agency’s “Pandemic Unemployment Assistance” records, a federally funded program that provided for up to 79 weeks of inflated benefits to people unable or unavailable to work due to the pandemic, the indictment stated.
Wellington was fired by Company B on Oct. 7, 2021, according to the indictment. Over the next month, Wellington and Easley accessed the IDES system without authority and “falsely and fraudulently” modified the wage histories of some 471 applicants for pandemic assistance, resulting in vastly augmented checks being disbursed to those individuals, according to the charges. Those recipients in turn kicked thousands of dollars back to Wellington and Easley, according to the indictment.
The defendants also altered their own wage histories, the charges alleged. Between Oct. 9 and Oct. 14, 2021,
Wellington fraudulently increased her own wage history three times, rising from about $16,000 to approximately $71,000, causing IDES to issue her payments totaling more than $13,000, according to the indictment.
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Easley’s reported wages were raised even more drastically, from $76 to nearly $70,000, leading the state to cut him a substantial unemployment check, the indictment alleged, though the exact amount he received was not included in the charges.
The indictment is among a long string of pandemic-related fraud cases involving IDES, which was previously found to have paid out more than $5 billion in fraudulent or excessive claims over the first two years of the pandemic, which led businesses to cut back their operations or shut down and left many Illinoisans out of work.
A 2023 report from the Illinois auditor general said millions of dollars was sent to people who were either in prison or dead. Some $2.8 billion of the fraud was classified as identity theft, money that is not considered recoverable since it can’t be collected from the identity theft victim.
“IDES was not prepared to respond to the needs created by the pandemic,” the report from Auditor General Frank Mautino’s office stated. “IDES did not have a plan for responding to recessions and potential surges in claims.”