The state decides the claim on what the claimant said.

A former employee files, and the state mails your address of record a request for separation information with 2 to 15 days on it depending on the state. It reaches the person who can answer it about four days later. At an employer with no claims specialist the window shuts before anyone answers it, so the only account of the separation the state has is the claimant’s. Unemploy puts AI agents on that window instead.

What the state sends you, and when

A former employee files. The state mails a request for separation information to your address of record and gives you a short window to answer it. It asks what the last day worked was, why they left, and whether you have documents. It arrives in the mail, and it reaches the person who can answer it about four days later.

Then a determination says whether the claimant is eligible and which employers’ accounts are charged. Then, every quarter, a statement lists every dollar paid and charged to you, with its own window to protest. Then, once a year, the experience rate is computed from those charges and applied to every dollar of taxable payroll for the next year, at somewhere between two and five percent for an employer your size.[S4]

How much money is in this

Four causes of overpaid unemployment benefits turn on facts the employer holds: benefit year earnings, separation issues, base period wage issues, and severance, vacation, SSI or pension. In the twelve months to June 2025 states paid out $2,319,492,170 on those four.[src] That total is the sum of four cause rows in a Department of Labor file. DOL does not print it, and the row below says so.

Equifax says on its own page that its clients recover over $200 million in charge errors each year. It publishes no client count and no year with that figure, and its own footnote on it reads “Equifax data”. The $2,319,492,170 above is a national pool computed from a sample the Department of Labor runs in every state. The two do not share a denominator, so a percentage made out of them would be arithmetic pretending to be a measurement. Set beside each other they are an order of magnitude apart.

And there is a penalty for the pattern

A federal law from 2011 lets a state stop relieving your account altogether once you have shown a habit of answering late or answering thinly[S16], which means the claims you would have won stop being winnable. In California, a pattern is two failures on one claimant.

This is why the deadline engine, and not the drafting, is the part of this product that cannot fail. Deadlines, state routing and relief grounds are code with a typed API over a sourced rules table. The agents read notices, assemble facts and draft text. An agent never computes a deadline and never picks a relief ground the table does not contain.

The agents, and what each one does

Equifax describes its unemployment operation as a team of around 500 people.[S2] USC’s own page says “USC receives the notice. USC files the response. USC resolves the claim.” Both are real services and both are priced like services, because in both cases a person works each claim.

Unemploy runs the same work with AI agents, one per step, and you are the only person in any of it.

An agent reads the notice

It arrives, the agent classifies it by type, and it goes on its state’s clock. That happens the hour it lands, not the day someone opens the folder.

An agent computes the deadline

Every due date is computed from the rules table, which carries the page each row was read off. Six different things can stop that computation and each one refuses by name rather than falling back on a default number of days. A guessed deadline renders identically to a real one and puts a countdown on the screen, and the customer finds out it was wrong when the window has already shut.

An agent walks every window, every thirty minutes

It escalates to you at three days left, at one day left and at two hours left. Inside the last window nothing quiets it, and it clears when the item is filed and not before.

An agent asks your manager

One question set per separation type, sent to the manager who did the firing. Every question names the state manual it was read out of, with the date that manual was fetched, and a question with no source on it fails the build.

An agent drafts the response

Each answer becomes a fact with the manager named as its source. A sentence with no fact behind it is not written: the composer stops rather than produce a draft that cites nothing.

An agent records what the state said

Determinations and protest outcomes are read once a day. Every denial goes into the corpus with the reason the state gave for it.

The one person in this is you. The agents hand you a finished draft with the evidence every sentence of it cites. You read it and you press send. That step exists because a filing goes out in your company’s name, and it is the default on every filing type. Grant a power of attorney and that step goes too.

The audit, which is free

The claims desk works forward, on the notices that arrive from today. The audit works backward, on the four quarterly statements you already have, and it is how you see what the last year of unanswered claims actually cost you. We do not charge for it and the report is yours whether or not you hire us.

It reads each statement as a document rather than as a template, because the format changes quarter to quarter inside one state. Every charge line comes off the page with its claimant, its weeks, its amount and its claim effective date. Every line is matched against your terminations export. Every matched line is scored against that state’s own relief grounds, and every unmatched line becomes a question for you rather than a finding.[§7.1]

Then it drafts. One protest per line or grouped by claimant, and 31 lines produced 38 protests in the worked example above, in the state’s own format, citing a ground from that state’s rules table and attaching the evidence it cites. Nothing is filed until you approve it, and the draft opens with dates rather than narrative, because an adjudicator with hundreds of cases skims a story and reads a date table.

Not a law firm. Unemploy prepares responses on the employer’s behalf and does not provide legal advice. Any claim touching discrimination, retaliation, leave, workers’ compensation or whistleblowing is escalated to counsel and never filed on the merits. Hearing representation happens only where non-attorney representation is permitted and the rules table carries a sourced entry saying so. Unsourced is not permission.

Who this is for

High turnover and short windows, with no one on staff whose job this is. Claims arrive on no schedule, the separation response window is the shortest of the three, and the folder of state mail gets opened late. The protest window on the quarterly statement closes between 10 and 60 days after the statement date depending on the state.

Staffing firms, 200 to 2,000 employees

Turnover is the business, so claims are constant and the quarterly statement is long.

Hospitality groups, hotels and restaurants

Seasonal separations, part-time managers, and a folder of state mail that gets opened late.

HR and payroll leads, the person who opens the mail

You know the deadline is short. Nothing has to be integrated first: no portal login, no power of attorney, no system to connect.

CFOs and controllers, the SUTA line

SUTA is charged on every payroll and the rate is computed from the charges on the account. Every charge relieved shows up as a rate delta.

What it costs

Unemploy is priced per employee per year. You are billed on headcount, once a year, whatever your claim volume turns out to be. There is no per-claim fee, so a quarter with heavy turnover costs you the same as a quiet one, and there are no per-seat licences and no setup fee. The rate per employee is agreed on the first call, from your headcount and the states you operate in.

The benefit-charge audit is free, and the findings report is yours either way, including every line listed as correct. The pricing page carries the whole of it.