Ending jobless benefits difficult

After weeks of anger and frustration trying to get unemployment benefits, some Floridians are now getting just as frustrated trying to stop getting them.

“I have been back to work since May 5 and can’t for the life of me figure out how to stop the payments,” Sumter County resident Lynne Reichle wrote the Orlando Sentinel recently. “I have spoken to other people I work with, and they are in the dark as well.”

Florida’s beleaguered, $77 million CONNECT system is the subject of an inspector general investigation ordered by Gov. Ron DeSantis after claimants repeatedly could not get through to process claims or experienced weeks of non-payment over the first two months of the coronavirus outbreak.

Since then, the outmoded system that DeSantis called “the equivalent of throwing a jalopy into the Daytona 500” has seen new leadership, more servers and hundreds of new call center employees either hired temporary or moved over from other departments.

The Florida Department of Economic Opportunity now says it has paid more than $2.7 billion on than 1 million eligible claims, with hundreds of thousands of claims either duplicates, filled out improperly, or ineligible.

But now, even successful claimants are finding another quirk, stopping the checks from coming once they’re reemployed.

In April, Gov. Ron DeSantis waived the state requirement that claimants recertify every two weeks to prove they’ve applied to at least five jobs. That waiver lasted until May 30.

But according to federal law, claimants are still required to return to the CONNECT system every two weeks to request their benefits or “claim their weeks,” said DEO spokeswoman Paige Landrum.

“In so doing, claimants will confirm that they are still unemployed due to COVID-19 and acknowledge that they are able and available for work should it be offered,” Landrum said.

Once a claimant doesn’t check in, either because they found a new job or they just forgot, payment should stop.

But for workers such as Doug Eldredge of Safety Harbor, the system has left him in “a really weird quandary.”

Eldredge, who works in the concert touring industry, said he at first successfully applied