LANSING, Mich., Dec. 30, 2025 — State Reps. Mai Xiong (D-Warren) and Joey Andrews (D-St. Joseph) introduced a legislative package to update Michigan’s unemployment law to protect workers who receive overpayment notices from the Unemployment Insurance Agency (UIA) through no fault of their own. Together, House Bills 5393 and 5394 would change how the state handles benefit overpayments to ensure state unemployment systems are fair, transparent and held accountable to administrative errors.
“During a global pandemic, families used unemployment benefits to keep food on the table, pay rent and survive an unprecedented crisis. Now, years later, thousands of Michigan workers are being asked to pay it back. That’s not right. Workers shouldn’t bear the cost of administrative errors when they did everything they were told to do,” Xiong said. “Michigan workers shouldn’t be forced to repay pandemic unemployment benefits because of system failures they didn’t cause, which is why I’m proud to have recently introduced this legislation to prevent the UIA from collecting these alleged overpayments. Accountability should rest on the process — not the people who relied on it in good faith to get through the hardest moment of their lives.”
The package is the legislators’ action to provide justice to the nearly 350,000 Michigan workers who received notice from the UIA earlier this year that they would be required to repay up to $2.7 billion due to overpayments made on benefits they filed for as far back as March 2020.
“Michigan’s working families are struggling enough as it is,” Andrews said. “Asking them years later to repay benefits given during the pandemic is simply unfair. These were lifelines that helped families survive through one of the most difficult times in living memory. Overpayments as a result of administrative errors should not be paid by the people who were just trying to get by. I’m proud to be a part of this legislative package that protects benefit recipients and works to hold our state systems accountable when they fail to serve the people.”
###