Evers asks state’s DWD leader to resign over jobless benefits backlog
MADISON - Gov. Tony Evers has effectively fired the leader of the state’s workforce development agency, which has struggled for months to clear a massive backlog of unemployment claims since the pandemic hit Wisconsin.
Department of Workforce Development Secretary Caleb Frostman left his job Friday after Evers asked for his resignation immediately.
The governor had grown increasingly frustrated by the lack of progress in clearing the claims and getting benefits to those who deserve them despite increased resources and staffing for the agency, a source close to the governor’s office told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.
Frostman’s resignation comes at a time when nearly 100,000 Wisconsinites are waiting to hear whether they will receive unemployment benefits.
Nearly 3,000 have been waiting since March and April, when Evers shuttered non-essential businesses to curb the spread of the coronavirus, forcing thousands of people out of work.
“People across our state are struggling to make ends meet, and it is unacceptable that Wisconsinites continue to wait for the support they need during these challenging times,” Evers said in a statement.
“We have continued to add additional state resources to support the DWD, but it is clear that we must have change if we are going to address these problems to get folks their benefits faster,” he said.
Frostman did not immediately return a phone call seeking comment. In his resignation letter to Evers,
Frostman said his work felt “incomplete” but had confidence in the agency’s staff.
“... The dedicated, professional team at DWD will continue serving Wisconsin’s workforce through adversity and under immense pressure, including assisting the hundreds of thousands who are out of work through no fault of their own,” Frostman said in a letter dated Friday.
Chenon Times Rainwater, a West Bend mother who helped organize a Facebook support group for people waiting for their claims to be processed after waiting two months for her own claim to be cleared, said Frostman’s resignation is “long overdue.”
“It will only make a difference if his replacement is an individual willing to make changes and step outside of politics,” she said.
Rep. John Nygren, a Republican from Marinette and the co-chairman of the Legislature’s budget committee, said he didn’t see Frostman as the entire source of the problems with the state’s unemployment system.
“The buck does stop at Caleb Frostman’s desk, but it also stops at Tony Evers’ desk,” Nygren said.
He said Evers needs to do more and say how he is going to end the backlog soon.
“Give me some reason to believe that something is going to change today that you couldn’t have done four months ago.”
Evers in his statement also apportioned blame to Republicans for not updating the agency’s systems when it became clear years ago they were out of date, and passing laws over the last decade that made it harder to qualify for benefits. Those laws were put in place to prevent fraud and save employers money.
Democratic state Sen. Jon Erpenbach of West Point also pointed at the laws and outmoded system.
“Caleb had a very, very difficult job, particularly with the legislation that passed making it more difficult to get unemployment,” Erpenbach said. “I think he did the best you could do under very difficult circumstances.”
Erpenbach said legislators should have heeded an audit from Republican Gov. Scott Walker’s time in office that showed there were problems with the state’s unemployment system.
So far, over 513,000 Wisconsin residents have applied for weekly unemployment benefits due to the coronavirus pandemic. They have submitted over 6.5 million applications for benefits since the pandemic hit, according to department data.
Nearly 11% of those weekly claims are still waiting in the backlog of over 713,000 claims as of Sept. 12, the data shows, which breaks down to 98,309 individuals.
Some of those people have been waiting since March to access their unemployment benefits.
Those claimants have complicated situations that require a lengthy adjudication process, the department said.
There’s no estimation for when those early claims will be cleared, and no estimation for when the backlog of claims will be gone, either, department officials have said in recent weeks.
Republicans who control the state Legislature have said Evers has not demonstrated enough urgency on the issue, and called for the governor to increase staffing and provide temporary loans to people waiting for benefits.
Wisconsin is not the only state experiencing such delays, but it is among states with the largest number of people still waiting six months after the virus began to spread.
Since the pandemic hit, the department hired more than 1,000 employees to answer phones and adjudicate cases.
But the system the agency uses to process claims has long been outdated and had trouble keeping up with spikes in job losses — something known by at least three administrations and hundreds of lawmakers.
Lawmakers and state officials knew in 2007 that the system to process unemployment claims needed an upgrade. In 2014, an audit showed that at one point up to 80% of calls to the agency for help were blocked because of the system’s limits during times of higher unemployment.
“It can be challenging for DWD to handle significant, temporary increases in calls during certain times of the year,” state auditors wrote in December 2014.
That warning came nearly a decade after state officials began and abandoned a project to replace the department’s 1970s-era system used to track unemployment insurance claims and appeals — an effort that would take years and cost tens of millions of dollars.
Amy Pechacek, deputy secretary of the Department of Corrections, will move to the agency for the time being until Evers appoints a new secretary.
Pechacek has a bachelor’s degree in sociology from UW–Madison and a master’s degree in public policy and public administration from Northwestern University.
According to Pechacek’s biography on DOC’s website, she “has been involved in public policy development and acted in advisory roles for multiple practice areas associated with local and large-scale governmental administration, specializing in crisis management for compliance related damage mitigation and program recovery.”