Controlling Unemployment Insurance Costs: The Employer's Comprehensive Guide to the UIC System, by Gabe Donnadieu and Robert A. Schuler (Quorum Books, 1994). Controlling Unemployment Insurance Costs is an authoritative, useful guide to the UIC system. The target readership for this work is anyone involved in hiring, discharging, or dealing with employment issues. Others, who will find it valuable, according to the authors, are human resource managers in universities and schools, non-profit organizations, attorneys, and paralegals. The authors have credible experience and draw upon their backgrounds extensively in putting together this resource. Gabe Donnadieu spent nearly fifteen years in various positions for the Arizona unemployment insurance program. During his tenure as a government employee, he was directly involved in issuing over 25,000 unemployment insurance decisions. For the past eight years, he has represented over 150 employers of all sizes, in more than 1,000 unemployment hearings in the Southwest. He has obtained a favorable decision for clients in over ninety-seven percent of his cases. The co-author is attorney Robert Schuler, who served as an administrative law judge for unemployment hearings for over four years. Before the ALU position, Schuler owned and operated a manufacturing firm, which provided valuable insights as a past employer. The beginning of the book offers an overview of how the Unemployment Insurance Compensation (UIC) program is supposed to work. A description of the hierarchy of the system at the federal, state, and appeals levels provides insight into the bureaucracy of the system and is enhanced by some tips on how to make an effective complaint to any level of the UIC management program. A position that is introduced in this section of the book and is consistently reinforced in other chapters is that the UIC system favors claimants. The authors are not ambiguous in this respect nor on the reasons they give for the status quo. The second chapter is devoted to myths and misconceptions about unemployment insurance. A couple of examples are: Myth: If someone quits, he or she cannot collect unemployment insurance; Myth: If someone is fired, he or she can always collect unemployment insurance. Most of the myths either deal with technicalities or exceptions to the general rule. While the intended audience for the book is employers, I would expect this chapter to be an equally useful resource to employees. Maintaining a system of written documentation is the general theme of the third chapter. Specifically, it discusses how to prepare a paper trail to document events leading up to the likely discharge of an employee. It is interesting to note that the UIC system uses a moving party standard to determine if a work separation is a discharge, a quit, or a layoff. Whoever acts to cause the separation bears the burden of proof. Sometimes, however, there can be confusion about who is the moving party. Controlling Unemployment Insurance Costs provides mini-case studies to illustrate the uncertainty involved in identifying the moving party. The authors also provide very detailed guidance on the procedures to follow when warning an employee, including written warnings, verbal warnings, and what types of discharges don't require warnings. Chapter four is similar to chapter three in format, taking the warning one-step further by examining the topic of discharging an employee. …