Kansas Department of Labor · Office of Appeals · Public record
KDOL Attorney Eric Smith Should Be Removed, Investigated & Disbarred For Gross Incompetence and Discrimination
A first-person account of the May 18, 2026 hearing, and a legal reading of the June 2 decision that followed it. The officer is KDOL Appeals Referee Eric Smith of Topeka — not the Kansas City trial lawyer of the same name.
I was on the call.
I am not the claimant. I was the witness sitting next to her while a State of Kansas hearing officer decided whether she would eat. The employer was Johnson County Community College. The employer had a lawyer. She did not. The officer’s name, printed on the decision that arrived two weeks later, is Eric Smith.
He said he had not read the briefs. Then he ran a five-hour hearing. Almost all of it belonged to the college.
What I saw on May 18
Unemployment hearings in Kansas are supposed to be informal so an ordinary person can be heard. Informal does not mean one-sided. The statute still requires a “reasonable opportunity for a fair hearing.” That is K.S.A. 44-709(c). KDOL’s own pamphlet tells claimants the referee is a licensed Kansas attorney, stays neutral, and will help when they do not understand something.
That is not the hearing I sat through.
He admitted, on the record, that he had not read the parties’ briefs. The file was not a sticky note. It was an appeal brief, a two-hundred-page exhibit packet, the college’s brief, the college’s sur-reply, medical records, ADA letters, and an internal retaliation complaint naming three of the people the college then put on as witnesses. Taking evidence for five hours without reading that record is not preparation. It is walking into court and asking the parties to narrate a novel he refused to open.
He was hostile to her from the jump. Not firm. Hostile. When she asked for a basic accommodation — that I be allowed to clarify a term so she could follow a proceeding her illness and her lack of legal training made hard to track — he refused. He directed that I was not to clarify even a single word. He said it like she had asked for a favor instead of a way to be present in her own case.
He gave her three questions.
Three.
The college got more than three hours. Four witnesses. A lawyer. When she tried to cross-examine, he cut her off as not relevant. When she tried to object, he told us this was not a formal hearing and the rules did not work that way. When the college’s lawyer objected, those objections landed. Same phone line. Two different courtrooms.
She has a documented medical condition. She was already exhausted. She was trying to defend a job she had spent months trying to keep. He treated her confusion as a character defect and her requests for help as disruption. By the end she did not want to appeal. That is not a coincidence. That is what a hostile proceeding does to a sick person who showed up alone against an institution.
Three of the college’s witnesses — McGee, Miller, Burkett — were at that time respondents in her internal retaliation complaint. The file said so. He had not read the file. So the conflict never made it onto the record as a problem. It just sat there, in uniform, answering questions for hours.
Hostility is the icing. The cake is the opinion he signed on June 2. That document is public. It does not need my tone. It needs the statute.
The law he was hired to apply
Kansas does not pay unemployment to every person who leaves a job. If you quit without a good work-related reason, you are disqualified. The statute then lists the reasons that still count. A referee’s whole job is to decide which box the facts fall in — not to invent a simpler box because the employer handed him one.
An individual shall be disqualified if the individual left work voluntarily without good cause attributable to the work or the employer… “Good cause” is cause of such gravity that would impel a reasonable, not supersensitive, individual exercising ordinary common sense to leave employment. Good cause requires a showing of good faith… including the presence of a genuine desire to work. K.S.A. 44-706(a)
The individual is not disqualified if the individual left work because of unwelcome harassment of the individual by the employer or another employee of which the employing unit had knowledge and that would impel the average worker to give up such worker’s employment. K.S.A. 44-706(a)(7)
Those are independent doors. Lose on one, you can still walk through another. Hazardous conditions is its own door. A personal emergency after a real attempt to keep the job is another. KDOL’s own hearing manual tells referees there are twelve statutory reasons a person may quit and still take benefits. Smith treated them as one sentence: she wanted to work from home, the college said no, case closed.
Opinion: the errors, strongest first
What follows is a reading of the four pages he signed. It is not a request to reopen the benefits claim. The appeal window closed. It is an argument that the officer who wrote those pages is not competent to keep writing them for other people.
Error I · He cited (a)(7) and decided a different statute
The elements of unwelcome-harassment leaving are four: unwelcome harassment; by the employer or another employee; known to the employing unit; of a quality that would drive an average worker out.
What he wrote instead: “The fact the employer disagreed with the claimant on what a reasonable accommodation was is not evidence of the employer harassing the claimant.”
That sentence answers a question the statute does not ask. Of course a denied preference, standing alone, is not harassment. The file was not a denied preference standing alone. It was exclusion from campus, locked systems, a stall measured in months, and a written demand that tied the separation to retaliatory and intolerable conditions — not to a taste for pajamas.
He never ran the four elements against that conduct. He substituted the college’s caption for the Legislature’s test. That is not a credibility call. That is a failure to apply the law he quoted.
Error II · He treated separate statutory doors as one remote-work fight
The heading on his own decision still says “Voluntary Quit–Hazardous Working Conditions.” K.S.A. 44-706(a)(5) tells him what to weigh: risk to this person’s health, safety measures, condition of equipment, comparison to similar work. He never cites (a)(5) by number. He never walks the factors. He stops at two vendor air tests the college paid for.
Two lab reports can be believed. Believing them does not finish the statute. An air purifier and masks offered after a 168-day delay are safety measures. He used them only as proof of the college’s virtue and of her bad faith. He never asked whether they were adequate for a person whose physician had already linked the building to relapse, and whose job was talking to vendors on the phone — the exact task a mask would wreck.
Error III · He turned a preservation notice into a resignation
The exhibit he relies on gives a two-week deadline. It asks for remote work or an equivalently effective alternative. It says, on the page, that it is not a voluntary resignation.
He finds that the letter “indicate[d] she would not work after March 13” and that she “resigned because the employer did not agree to the claimant’s demands.”
That is a legal conclusion about what a document is. The document’s own words defeat it.
Two paragraphs earlier he quotes 44-706(a)(11), which requires reasonable efforts to preserve the work before a personal-emergency leaving counts. A dated cure letter is that effort. He used the preservation letter as proof she did not want the job. Quote a duty to try to stay. Punish the try. That is not interpretation. That is inversion.
Error IV · He reduced good faith to one unused gadget
His entire good-faith analysis is a single sentence: she made no attempt to work with the purifier and masks, therefore no good faith.
Good faith is a totality inquiry. Genuine desire to work is the same inquiry. The totality in this file includes years of showing up sick, written requests to return, a demand for notice of the charges so she could defend the position instead of being disappeared, and a two-week written chance for the employer to cure. He selected the omitted trial of the employer’s late substitute and called it the whole moral fact. That is advocacy for the party that already had the lawyer.
Error V · He used “supersensitive” to cancel the person the statute tells him to consider
The reasonable-person filter exists so nobody collects unemployment because the office coffee is wrong. It is not a license to ignore a physician-documented condition the employer already knew about. The hazardous-conditions subsection specifically asks about risk to this individual’s health. He used her diagnosis as the reason a reasonable person would have stayed. That reads the medical evidence out of the statute the Legislature put it into.
Error VI · He treated an employer policy as if it were the code
“The employer does not allow employees to work 100% remotely” is a finding about JCCC’s preference. It is not K.S.A. 44-706. Unemployment law does not end because the employer has a rule against the thing requested — especially where the same work had already been performed remotely. A policy that has already been bent is not an immovable legal wall. He used it as one anyway.
Error VII · He found none of the facts that make (a)(7) go
A referee has to find the facts the statute makes material. He found the ultimatum, the two tests, the February letter, and the unused masks. He did not find the campus ban, the lockout, the retaliation complaint, the identity of the decision-makers as respondents in that complaint, the 168-day gap, or the “this is not a resignation” sentence in the exhibit he cites. Those are not color. They are the facts (a)(7) and good faith turn on. An opinion that never finds them is not a reasoned application of (a)(7). It is a decision in a different case.
The one thing he is entitled to is this: giving more weight to two professional air tests than to a claimant-collected dust sample from other floors is a finding of fact. Do not dress that up as legal genius, and do not call it incompetence. Call incompetence what it is — citing a statute and then refusing to run it.
Why the setting matters
This was not a quiet fight inside a private shop. JCCC is a public college. When Smith held that hearing, the college was already in federal court on employment claims, including Chandler v. Johnson County Community College, D. Kan. No. 2:25-cv-02399, filed July 2025 and still pending. Another employment case, Wise v. JCCC, had been pending until it was dismissed weeks earlier.
A public institution with an active HR docket does not get a referee who skips the harassment subsection and converts a “fix this” letter into a quit. Complaining to the state about how a taxpayer-funded college handled disability and retaliation is petition and speech on public business. Kansas wrote the Public Speech Protection Act so process is not a muzzle. This page is that speech. The complaints going to the Secretary of Labor, the Office of Appeals, and the Office of the Disciplinary Administrator are that petition.
What I am asking for
Not a rerun of the benefits case. The window closed. Three things, on the public record:
- Produce the official audio of the May 18, 2026 hearing in Appeal 130258.
- Investigate how Referee Eric Smith of the KDOL Office of Appeals prepared for, conducted, and decided that case — including the admitted failure to read the briefs, the three-question cap on the unrepresented claimant, the refused hearing accommodation, and the legal errors in the June 2 opinion.
- Remove him from the unemployment-hearing roster until that review is finished.
You do not need a law degree for the standard.
If the officer quotes the rule, then tries a different case, then treats a “this is not a resignation” letter as a resignation, he should not be the voice Kansas puts on the phone when someone’s benefits are on the line.
I was on the call. The pages he signed are in the mail. Both are enough.
Matthew Brunken appeared as a witness on the May 18, 2026 telephone hearing. The legal discussion above addresses the written Referee Decision mailed June 2, 2026, a public agency act. Hearing-conduct statements are first-person observation and should be checked against the official audio, which has been requested. No criminal accusation is made. No claim is made against Eric W. Smith of Siro Smith Dickson PC. Serve complaints: Secretary of Labor and Office of Appeals, 401 SW Topeka Blvd., Topeka, KS 66603-3182 · Appeals fax 785-291-6086 · Office of the Disciplinary Administrator, 301 SW 10th Ave., Topeka, KS 66612.