Vermont Business Magazine Dealer.com has announced two major deals for its Website products. It has been selected as a premier partner in the FordDirect Advantage Digital Advertising Program and as a choice Honda website and digital advertising provider through the Honda Digital Customer Experience.

by Timothy McQuiston, Vermont Business Magazine Vermont Auditor of Accounts Doug Hoffer released this week the first part of series of audit reports on OneCare Vermont. OneCare is a collaboration of the University of Vermont Medical Center and Dartmouth-Hitchcock, the state and the federal government. The concept is to pay health care providers a lump sum to provide preventative care, which in the long run will save the entire health care system a lot of money.

by Timothy McQuiston, Vermont Business Magazine After a steep decline as the economy began to reopen in April, initial unemployment claims for the last several weeks have flattened and are holding in the 2,000 per week range. They hit their peak in early April. As the governor has continued to open up the economy, the weekly unemployment insurance claims fell rapidly until early June. The last few weeks has seen them bouncing up and down.

Vermont Business Magazine Amid a national concern for identity theft and a subsequent threat of fraudulent unemployment insurance claims increasing, the State of Vermont and Department of Labor have taken steps to increase monitoring and awareness for unemployment insurance fraud. Cases of fraudulent unemployment claims associated with identity theft occur when an individual’s identity has been stolen and a claim has been opened in their name. This is also known as “imposter fraud.” While the theft of the identity likely occurred in the months and years prior to COVID-19 as part of national and global data breaches, the Department of Labor wants individuals to be aware of steps it is taking to monitor fraud, and how to prevent theft from occurring in the first place.

Vermont Research News While much recent attention has focused on urban police forces, such as the move to cut the Burlington police budget, town spending on police services has also grown. Student researchers with the Legislative Intern Policy Center collected data from 140 towns on how much they spend on police services. Some towns spend a lot and some spend very little. Per capita town-level spending ranges from almost zero to above $400. Also, In a sample of interviewed participants around Burlington, 25.8% had either never, or very rarely accessed their local natural areas before the pandemic.