Government efficiency???

For those that don't know, I was laid off from Motorola about 3 years ago.  Because a large number of people were being laid off, the WARN Act was triggered, requiring a 60 day notice - I had to be paid for the 60 days but Motorola didn't need to have be work (a good deal if you can get it - money for nothing).  It was pretty clearly stated by an IL unemployment office representative that we should apply for unemployment benefits as soon as we were not working - and that being paid in any way by Motorola wasn't relevant to this, just whether we had to report to work.  (Basically, the 60 days was debited from my severance payment, so it wasn't really a salary payment).  In fact, this seemed so strange and people kept asking to verify in different ways that she actually seemed to get annoyed.

The following year, a number of people on an ex-Motorola mail group reported that IDES was asking for verification of not-working during the interval.  Apparently someone at Motorola messed up some report which lead to the (mistaken) assumption that all of the 500+ people laid off were indeed working during the 60 days.  They also tried to contact me, however the audit division did not receive information about my address update that the unemployment office had received, so they sent the notice to my old address, with directions not to forward or return the mail...  No response must mean that I agree with their decision, so they start trying to take back the money I received.  I don't learn about this until the IRS helpfully sent them our tax refund for this year....

A few absolutely fantastic examples of government efficiency here. 

1. Two groups in the same agency can't share information about people, so that maybe letters get sent to the right address.  I really don't understand this - hopefully the nice lady on the phone didn't really know why the address might be wrong - and the same agency isn't wasting taxpayers money to maintain multiple datasets of the same information and then not keeping them synchronized...
2. For no good reason, the state of Illinois doesn't want to have official mail forwarded, or be notified that the mail was not actually received.  I didn't think that it cost money to have mail returned (either that or we just have a really nice mailman here).
3. No attempt is made to figure out why no response was received.
4. No attempt is made to find the right address.  This really can't be too hard - Columbia House Music group has managed to track me through 3 moves and I really don't want them to keep sending me junk mail - Columbia house managed to track my wife through a name change and 4 moves - hoping to get a couple hundred dollars.  Heck - even the people who bought our house in Grayslake found my address on Google to forward some mail...
5. Nobody at IDES noticed that hundreds of people seemed to have incorrect claim information, or that hundreds of people were appealing decisions...  At the very least, they could save some money by grouping all the January Motorola departees and clear the investigation at one shot, instead of having hundreds of state employees sit down and review things one-at-a-time...

I am a bit astounded at the laziness of this agency - they don't have the same motivation that a record club has to find my current address.  A business running the unemployment benefits under contract (for profit) would have kept this from happening, and probably would have found my new address (so they might recover funds more quickly)...

By the time this is over, they will likely have expended several times the decision amount in peoples time to investigate, correct and return my money to me...  Sorry in advance to the people of Illinois...