1 million EDD claims stuck in backlog
Bottleneck: 1.06M claims taking more than 21 days to process
A backlog of claims for unemployment benefits filed by California workers remains stuck at well over 1 million, a brutal reminder of the economic woes that the coronavirus has unleashed.
The bottleneck has topped that grim benchmark for more than a month, according to an official dashboard posted by the embattled state Employment Development Department.
As of Tuesday, the EDD’s dashboard was the official measure of how far the state labor department lags in paying unemployed workers who have lost their jobs in record numbers during the one-year period since government agencies began to orchestrate business shutdowns to combat the COVID-19 outbreak.
On March 10, according to the most recent update, the backlog totaled slightly under 1.06 million claims that have taken more than 21 days for the EDD to process. That includes 933,100 initial unemployment claims and 122,700 continuing claims.
An initial claim is deemed to be part of the backlog if it has taken more than 21 days to issue a first payment or to disqualify the claim.
A continuing claim is placed in the backlog if the worker has received at least one payment and is now waiting more than 21 days for the processing of a further payment or disqualification from more payments.
The EDD began tracking the claims backlog through the official dashboard starting on Sept. 30, and for six weeks all seemed well. On Jan. 6, the backlog dropped to 516,000 claims.
Then matters deteriorated badly. The state agency reported a surge in the claims bottleneck, which soared past 1 million on Feb. 3.
It was right around that time, on Jan. 28, that the EDD distanced itself from its own official dashboard, saying that it was working on a new dashboard that would more accurately reflect the state of the logjam.
“We aim to launch that dashboard in the next few weeks,” the EDD states on its website. However, it’s been nearly two months since the EDD made that vow.
What is certain is that for six consecutive weeks, the combined total of the backlog of claims has totaled at least 1 million filings stuck in bureaucratic limbo in each of the weekly reporting periods, according to the EDD official dashboard.
Separately, a different official report suggests that the EDD has faltered in its efforts to make the first payments to workers who have filed initial claims for unemployment.
The U.S. Labor Department’s Employment and Training Administration issues a monthly report that includes the number of initial claims made in each state, including California, during a particular month, and how many first-time payments were made in that month.
For January, the most recent month reported by the federal agency, California workers filed about 506,100 initial claims for unemployment, and the EDD made 89,600 firsttime payments to workers. That’s a gap of 416,500 between the claims and the payments in that month.
The gap for EDD’s first payments was 666,400 in December, 558,900 in November, 551,300 in October, and 723,800 in September 2020.
During the final two months before the business shutdowns began, the gap between initial claims and first payments by the EDD, as reported officially by the U.S. government, was 119,900 in January 2020 and 80,500 in February 2020.
In March 2020, the first month of the lockdowns, the gap ballooned to a chasm of 1.44 million.
“Our program data folks have been working hard on this project the past several weeks and we’re very close to sharing the finalized product,” the EDD told this news organization in an emailed comment.
The EDD has come under fire from unemployed workers, state lawmakers and the state Auditor for an array of failures related to unemployment benefits.
Among the criticisms:
• The EDD has failed to make payments to workers on a timely basis, due in part to a broken phone call center and a computer system hobbled by glitches.
• EDD blunders have opened the gates to a flood of fraudulent claims.
The state agency paid $10.4 billion to claimants with unverified identities and $810 million to prison inmates. The EDD admitted in January 2021 that the total fraud could reach $31 billion.