State’s jobless can’t get answers
Benefits delayed by ‘antiquated’ process at agency
Andrea Blum, a single mother living in Sebastopol, lost her job as a chef last year and ran out of unemployment benefits around November. On April 28, she applied for pandemic unemployment assistance based on the fact that two job offers she got earlier this year were put on hold because of the coronavirus.
She got approved, but has yet to receive any money. “The notice of pandemic unemployment assistance award tells me to go online (to certify for benefits), but there is nothing there” to certify, she said. “I have contacted the Employment Development Department over and over” by phone and email but has gotten no response.
Zoe Smith of Oakland applied for pandemic unemployment assistance on May 5 after losing all of her Airbnb income. She heard nothing until Monday, when she got one notice “informing me that I will receive $167 per week plus the extra $600 per week” and another titled “Notice of Determination for PUA that said I was denied the federal assistance. They also sent an appeal form,” she said. “I tried all the different phone numbers (for EDD) I was referred to and not a one was able to answer.”
Although the state has processed almost 5.7 million claims
and awarded $22.2 billion in unemployment benefits since midMarch, there are at least thousands of Californians like Blum and Smith hung up in the EDD’s antiquated, overloaded system. Nationwide, onethird of unemployment benefits owed to Americans who lost jobs because of the coronavirus have yet to be paid because of “creaking statelevel systems,” according to a Bloomberg analysis of jobless claims.
Even state legislators, who have liaisons in state departments, are running into brick walls. That includes Sen. Jerry Hill, DSan Mateo, who chairs the labor committee that oversees the EDD. From 2013 through March of this year, his office opened zero cases for constituents who had problems with the EDD. Today, “we have over 120 cases where they can’t solve it,” he said.
“The level of frustration among our constituents is growing. The level of tension is palpable for our staff. Some constituents are in tears, weeping in the calls. They are so frustrated and upset,” Hill added. Many constituents face password issues, delays in receiving their unemployment debit cards or “unusual circumstances that don’t fit into the neat, clean box we have,” Hill said.
State Sen. Scott Wiener’s office has opened almost 1,000 cases since March, compared to about 100 over the previous six months. “For months now we have received a massive number of calls from people who were at wit’s end due to their inability to get benefits to which they are clearly entitled,” said Wiener, DSan Francisco. “By the time someone calls their state senator to ask for help, they have already been getting the runaround.”
He added that “my office’s response time (from the EDD) went from a day to a week to two weeks to sometimes three weeks.”
The top complaint his office gets are from independent contractors who had a small portion of their income reported as employee wages on W2 forms, which qualified them for regular unemployment but disqualified them from getting higher benefits from the new federal pandemic unemployment assistance program, known as PUA. He can’t help with that because it’s a federal law.
Other common complaints come from people who were approved for benefits months ago but haven’t received them, were disqualified for no apparent reason, or were asked to verify their identity and did but never heard back from the EDD.
In a letter to state legislators last week, California Labor Secretary Julie Su said verifying identities “is one of the biggest sources of delay in delivering (unemployment insurance) and I have asked EDD to train more staff for this task. At the same time, we are hearing reports in other states of sophisticated fraud rings that involve identity theft and illegitimate UI applications.”
Another source of problems: The federal Cares Act created pandemic benefits for the selfemployed and others who did not qualify for regular state benefits.
The EDD allowed, even encouraged, selfemployed people to apply for regular state benefits before it had set up the application for pandemic benefits. Those who did, and did not qualify for regular benefits, could reapply starting April 28, when the EDD began accepting pandemic applications. However, some who tried to reapply got a message saying they could not, because they already filed a claim.
The application had several confusing or ambiguous questions that, if answered incorrectly, may have disqualified them. One yesorno question asked: “Are you currently selfemployed (have your own business or work as an independent contractor) or plan to become selfemployed? If you are impacted by the COVID19 pandemic, click No.”
That confused many people because to get pandemic benefits, you had to be selfemployed (or otherwise ineligible for state benefits) and impacted by the pandemic. The application now asks those two questions separately.
Farris Peale, a district representative for Wiener, said the “overarching” complaint her office gets “is that no one can get through to EDD. Everyone who contacts us says they have been trying to contact EDD for days, weeks or months.”
Laura Marks, a Sausalito video producer, applied for regular unemployment on April 1, but had a problem with her “base period,” the fourweek timeframe used to calculate benefits. Two weeks later, “I started a routine. I would call (EDD) every morning at 8 a.m. It was always a recorded message. I also emailed them every day on their website,” she said. She contacted her state senator and assemblyman, Gov. Gavin Newsom (who didn’t respond) and Su (who referred her to EDD). She finally got her first payment on May 27.
The EDD has three phone lines for unemployment. One is a recorded message. Another is staffed by people who can answer general questions but can’t look into a person’s claim. The third, 8003005616, is staffed with people who can look into claims, but it’s only open from 8 a.m. until noon on weekdays. Getting through is like winning the lottery. The odds of reaching someone are slim, but those who do usually get the help they need.
State Sen. Mike McGuire, DHealdsburg, said, “The No. 1, 2 and 3 issues we receive emails and calls about is unemployment benefits. One of the top issues we have heard — they filed more than five weeks ago and never heard back. It’s literally crickets.” He added that “Folks are distraught, they are desperate for funds.”
McGuire added that “for a few weeks, Bank of America was behind in sending out the debit cards” that contain benefits. “Those challenges have now subsided pretty significantly.”
The EDD’s problems stem from an unprecedented surge in unemployment claims — the state’s unemployment rate shot from a record low 3.9% in February to 15.5% in April — flooding into what Su called an “antiquated” system illequipped to manage complex new programs such as pandemic benefits.
Newsom’s budget proposal calls for giving EDD an extra $46 million in 202021 “to continue implementation of the Benefit Systems Modernization Project.”
Meanwhile, the EDD has received $118 million from the federal government under the Families First Act for administration, which will help pay for a big increase in staffing. The EDD is halfway through hiring 1,800 temporary part and fulltime workers to process claims and assist customers and employers. It will hire an additional 1,200 “to bolster the delivery of critical unemployment services,” EDD spokeswoman Loree Levy said in an email.
Su’s letter outlined other changes EDD is implementing, such as finding a “safe and secure way for claimants to upload documents” rather than mailing them. In a “pilot program,” it sent text messages to 105 claimants when their benefits were approved and sent. It is also testing options to provide “faster payment” than mailing out debit cards. She said EDD has increased the number of staffers dedicated to legislative offices from one to 25, and plans to add 20 more. Of those 45, 35 will be trained to resolve unemployment cases.
The EDD is also working with the state technology department and “new vendors” to improve call center operations, Su said. She added that “many of the notices (sent to claimants) need to be written in clearer, customerfriendly language, but because the notices are on the UI mainframe, changes take time.”