Lawmakers: California jobless claims still a ‘black hole’

SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP) — A beleaguered California agency’s attempt to stem an unemployment benefits scam potentially exceeding $2 billion while reducing a frustrating backlog is failing, two state lawmakers from opposing political parties said Thursday, though others reported fewer problems.

Democratic Assemblywoman Cottie Petrie-norris, who heads the Assembly Accountability and Administrative Review Committee, said she is seeing “a continued pattern of constituents who get lost in the process.”

Hundreds of residents across the state report “this sense of falling into a black hole where you don’t know what’s wrong, where you make phone calls that go unanswered, and you wait months and months for benefits and grow increasingly desperate,” she said.

Republican Assemblyman Jim Patterson, a frequent critic of Gov. Gavin Newsom’s Democratic administration, cited complaints from two whistleblower employees of the Employment Development Department as well as customers who contacted his office in saying the new Id.me verification system “is failing substantially.”

The system frequently rejects legitimate forms of identification, requiring those seeking benefits to undergo a more painstaking verification that can take months, Patterson said. Other applicants are waiting as long as five hours to have their identity confirmed on a video chat call, he said.