Bad news just keeps piling up at the EDD
The failures of California’s Employment Development Department are difficult to overstate. Recent disruptions to the website of the EDD have made it difficult for many Californians to get their unemployment claims processed in the timely manner they ought to expect.
On Monday, EDD issued a statement apologizing for what they described as “intermittent issues with the system” that made it difficult for those “looking to certify for their next two-week period of benefits.”
“The technology at the EDD continues to fail,” state Assembly member Jim Patterson, R-Fresno, said in a statement. “Instead of coming clean and telling us what’s actually going on, they continue to mislead us and the people of California who are relying on them.”
The recent disruptions are unfortunately just the latest development in a vast string of problems at the department.
Just last week, the Bay Area News Group reported that, “The backlog of claims for unemployment benefits filed by California workers has been stuck over 1 million for more than a month.”
The slow processing of claims may have been forgivable this time last year, but at this point such delays reflect a clearly dysfunctional system.
The breadth of failure at EDD is worth reflecting on.
IT failures and poor service are just the starting point for failure at EDD.
State officials have acknowledged that at least
$11 billion in unemployment claims over the past year were fraudulent.
California Labor Secretary Julie Su, who heads the executive-level state agency of which EDD is overseen by, has indicated that up to 27% of claims totaling over $30 billion could have been fraudulent.
It’s a staggering amount of money we’re talking about that hasn’t been fully appreciated. $11 billion to $30 billion was lost to fraud under the watch of Newsom and Su.
Su, incidentally, has been nominated by President Joe Biden to become the deputy secretary of labor.
EDD is the same agency which sent out at least 38 million pieces of mail last year containing the full Social Security numbers of Californians, after the state auditor warned EDD to cease the practice of including the full Social Security numbers of claimants back in 2019.
Then, when you look back at audits of EDD going back a decade, it’s clear EDD has had clearly identified problems for many years but no political will or pressure to do anything about it.
As far back as 2011, the state auditor noted the department, “consistently failed to meet certain core performance measures,” including timely issuing of payments, and noted “historically poor performance.”
Gov. Gavin Newsom and the California Legislature would serve Californians well by focusing more on making sure the government Californians are paying for is actually working as necessary than dreaming up any new expansions of state government. Just as importantly, Californians must also be willing to hold lawmakers accountable if they can’t make fixing EDD a top priority.