What this is a very routine agency investigation. This is nothing official like a prosecution, nor anything being done by a district attorney or charges pressed or anything at all involved with the criminal justice system at this point. While that can happen in cases of unemployment fraud, you are very far from it at this point.
What is going on is that some of your wage reporting has been different from the other various records they have of your weekly earnings during those weeks, and there have been some variants in the amount you reported versus what you actually made, when it was figured exactly according to how unemployment system figures weekly income. If you reported $460 in a week where you only made $160, you cheated yourself out of some money instead of getting what you may have been entitled to that week, but ANY variation between what was reported and what their records show will cause an automatic flagging of your claim for investigation.
As they have done, the people in the fraud and overpayment investigation unit will send you a letter and ask for a meeting. They're just doing a routine investigation. What you can do is show up for the meeting, bring pay stubs or bank records, in other words, everything you have to document your actual wages as accurately as possible. They'll have what you've reported, what the employer has reported to them that you were paid, and you'll be able to come up with exactly how much you made in each Sunday through Saturday week in gross wages, and how much you have drawn in unemployment.
They do not care why the errors were made, don't try to make excuses, refuse to provide them with any information or tell them some poor me story. The best approach is to be professional, fully cooperative and deal with this directly and promptly. They'll do the calculations and determine if you were actually overpaid or underpaid or whatever the situation requires. If you were overpaid, they probably, if you are being this cooperative, will not call this a fraud overpayment, which involves sanctions and/or shutting down the claim and whatever else they decide. It would be even better if you can pay them back fairly quickly, though they will likely be willing to take your future unemployment benefits if you're still drawing, or work out a payment program if you aren't and are not able to repay any overpayment immediately.
If you dodge them and duck them and do not show up when they ask to meet with you or for your feedback, they'll still make a decision about whether or not you were overpaid, and if you've not cooperated, they'll probably determine it was a fraud overpayment (done deliberately with intent to defraud the system). And then you'll get a letter saying that you ARE overpaid, by this much, and there's less leniency.
If they decide to, they could turn you over to the prosecutor to be prosecuted criminally for unemployment fraud. But this only happens in a very very small percentage of the overpayments they discover and investigate. At that point, in you are charged with actual fraud, you should consider retaining an attorney.
But from the sound of this, it's a routine investigation. Very few people can do a whole partial unemployment claim while reporting part time wages without being off a few dollars either way at some point. Tell the investigator you want to work with them and you want to get this matter straightened out as soon as possible. Work with them. You'll be fine.
