NY STATE - Request For Reconsideration [1099 Income Submitted] (receive, claim, qualify)

[NYC TECH]

RE: NY STATE - Request For Reconsideration [1099 Income Submitted]


Greetings Everyone,

I have a current UI Claim issue here in NYC. Below is my current situation. Any helpful feedback/information would be sincerely appreciated. THANKS IN ADVANCE.


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DETAILS
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I Have been an Independent Contractor for last 8 years (NYC).
I took a full time job as employee from mid March 2018 to end of May 2018.
My position was terminated at will by employer. Termination letter does not state particular reason.
Employer informed me they would not interfere with any UI claim.

I filed for UI early Sept 2018 here in New York City. Received a Determination Letter, stating I did not qualify with either Basic or Alternate base periods with the following fulltime employee earnings on record:

>January - March 2018 Q [$3,200] [Employee income]
>April - June 2018 Q [$19,600] [Employee income]


Since I was about 1,585 short of qualifying on the Alternate Base Period,
per the instructions on the Request For Reconsideration Form,
I reported/submitted additional employment income (1099 pay stub) for :

>July - September 2017 Quarter [$7,000] [Independent Contractor income]

*NOTE: I contracted directly with a medium sized NYC based company [300 -500 Employees],
They do pay into the NY State Unemployment Funds.



The very next day I received email from DOL instructing to call them regarding the additional employer/income I had just faxed. When I called them, the rep first claimed she did not "see" any of this new information in their system that I had faxed. However, when I told them the exact date, time, and number of pages I faxed to them, the rep all of a sudden "found" them. She then just proceeded to verify this updated information I had sent, and informed me it would take 4 to 6 weeks until they make a determination.

4 days later I recieved a "REVISED" DETERMINATION LETTER which was an exact duplicate of the first letter, (stating I did not qualify under Basic or Alternate Base periods). I called DOL next day, and again the rep did not "see" any additional Employer/Income information added in their system. She also claimed she did not see any records of Determination Letters having been mailed to me. Eventually she "found" the additional income/employer information I had submitted and informed me that my status is
still pending under investigation. She then said to just ignore the last Determination Letter I had just received because it probably was just automatically generated when I submitted the Request For Reconsideration Form. She then said to check in with them in a week if I have not seen any progress.


It is now a week later and I have not received any other correspondence from DOL.
The claim status is still "PENDING" on the online claims portal.


I will be calling DOL again tomorrow Tuesday or Wednesday, but first I wanted to check in here to see if anyone has any feedback or advice on what will most likely happen and how to handle this.

What are the chances of qualifying given my circumstance?
Is there anything else I could be proactively doing on this particular claim?

Any helpful information would be sincerely appreciated. Thanks in advance.


*NOTE: I have not earned any additonal employee wages before or after I filed this claim in early September 2018

[Chyvan]

You're doing it wrong.

You need to SCREAM that you were a misclassified 1099 worker. 1099 is NOT wages and you shouldn't have submitted it the way you did. You try to get ALL your 1099 wages reclassified, and get your self-employment taxes that YOU paid refunded to you. You don't just get to flirt with the system by saying, "if you just give me credit for this little bit of wages, then you can give me UI." It's all or nothing.

If someone did what you did, I'd poopoo them away because I figured you knew what you were getting into. You did it for 8 years. Someone that says, "hey, my 'employer' was ripping me off, and I didn't see it for what it was," now, I'd go put the screws to the 'employer' that did that because it's breaking the rules.

Your name will probably be mud in your industry, but hey, if they weren't breaking the rules, they should have NO problem proving that you were 1099, and then you won't get your UI claim anyway.

[NYC TECH]

Chyan,

Thank you for response and feedback. Much appreciated.

Per your feedback, I now understand that this is an all or nothing scenario with 1099
wages. One would need to be "misclassified" on all those 1099 wages from aparticular
company. This was not clear to me.

I assume DOL is waiting to hear back from this company. Do you know if there a time
limit for a company reply to DOL? If DOL does not hear back from a company within a certain
time-frame, does DOL make their own determination on "misclassification"?

Thanks again for your valuable feedback.
See note below regarding 1099 submittal to DOL.


*NOTE:
>Per a DOL rep, I was under the impression that because I have the major portion of
earnings covered under other employee earned wages, DOL would reconsider that small amount
of 1099 income to qualify my claim. This is what I was led to believe when I called DOL. I
specifically asked about submitting 1099 income and the rep told me that their Liability
Department would reconsider qualification with 1099 income.

They did not make it clear (and I was not made aware) that by submitting 1099 income to
cover the small amount I was short for qualification, I would trigger a
"misclassification" scenario.

> I might actually be misclassified - the particular company whose 1099 wages I submitted
to DOL, has on past ocassions asked me to be exclusively available to them for particuar
projects. I stopped doing 1099 work with this company last year.
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[Chyvan]

Misclassification works like this:

You prove that you worked and earned money - you did that.

Then the "employer" has the burden to prove that you were NOT an employee. They almost always lose unless they really know their stuff.