The state cleared her of fraud - then deducted the money from her next check
Idaho's Supreme Court rejected a worker's bid to waive a $228 unemployment overpayment, ruling her appeal lacked required legal citations.
The September 1, 2026 opinion turned entirely on procedure. The court held the worker forfeited every argument by not following Idaho Appellate Rule 35(a)(6), which requires citations to authority and the record. That rule applies equally to self-represented litigants and those with lawyers.
The underlying facts traced to a payroll mismatch. While collecting unemployment, the worker also held a part-time job at a home health agency and reported those earnings to the Idaho Department of Labor each week. A state audit flagged four weekly certifications where she had underreported the earnings.
The agency paid on a semi-monthly cycle - the 10th and 25th of each month - while the Department required weekly reporting. The agency's time clock also captured partial-hour increments the worker said she had not tracked. She calculated her pay by multiplying hours by her hourly rate and questioned whether the agency had reported net rather than gross wages.
The employer's own numbers were not spotless. Its initial report to the Department contained several "earnings calculation errors," and the agency "admitted there were some errors," the opinion noted. An investigator corrected the figures and recalculated, but the remaining shortfall still fell on the worker.
Under Idaho Code section 72-1369(5), a waiver requires the overpayment to have resulted solely from a Department error or from an employer misreporting wages. The Idaho Industrial Commission found neither condition was met. The Department did not treat the conduct as fraud, found the worker gave a reasonable explanation, and assessed no penalties.
On appeal the worker raised four arguments: the overpayment was the employer's fault, her hearing before the appeals examiner was unfair, the Department should not have deducted the $228 from a later benefit check - which left her with $62 that week - and repayment should be waived. She had maintained throughout that the investigator told her the discrepancy was the employer's fault. The court reached none of her arguments.
The Commission had acknowledged the appeals examiner "was at times abrupt" but found the worker had the chance to present witnesses and evidence. At the hearing, she conceded the time records "looked correct" and, asked for proof they were wrong, answered, "I guess not."
The mismatch between the employer's semi-monthly pay cycle and the state's weekly reporting window turned a rounding-and-timing difference into an overpayment that good faith alone could not erase.
