Several months later, 1.2M jobless still await money
Bartender Josh Vaughn served the last drink at a Hilton hotel bar in Savannah, Ga., on March 14. He was furloughed the next day. The company promptly filed paperwork for him to receive unemployment aid, yet he spent more than nine months waiting for the money.
Vaughn is among more than 1.2 million Americans stuck waiting months for desperately needed aid as states struggle to catch up with backlogs of unemployment claims stretching back to March, a Washington Post analysis showed.
In April, Vaughn received a letter saying he qualified for $320 a week, but then his file was put on hold until he proved his identity. The fraud check process took nearly six months to clear up. But Vaughn, who is now decorating cakes and stocking shelves at a grocery store, a job that pays about half what he made as a bartender, was waiting in December for his unemployment benefits.
“It’s just so unbelievably difficult to get unemployment. It shouldn’t be this hard, especially at a time like this when millions of us are out of work,” Vaughn said.
Vaughn received $14,000 in unemployment on Thursday — a few days after the Post inquired about his case with the state. The Post’s calculation reflects 703,000 pending appeals across the country and 529,000 people waiting on a benefits decision in the states that publicly share that information or who responded to a request for comment.
People’s claims have been held up for months at times for something as simple as a typo or uploading a scan of a driver’s license instead of a photo. Most delays are the result of three key factors: extensive fraud prevention checks, antiquated computer systems and applications getting flagged for extra scrutiny. Claims set aside for manual review often take months to resolve.
The holdup in sending out unemployment aid has caused families to fall severely behind on rent, cancel health treatments and struggle to buy food, according to interviews with more than a dozen people who have yet to receive any money despite applying for unemployment in the spring or summer.
The stimulus bill that President Donald Trump signed over the holidays includes an extra $300 a week for the unemployed until mid-March, but that additional money won’t help people who are still “pending” in the unemployment system.
The fact that so many are still waiting for their claims to be processed underscores how unprepared the United States was to deal with this large-scale crisis, analysts say. “The unemployment insurance system has been unfair,” said Andrew Stettner, a senior fellow at the Century Foundation. “In Europe, they’re paying unemployment through company payrolls, which is a lot simpler and faster. Here, the system has to handle millions of individual cases.”
The Post reached out to 20 state unemployment offices. Most stressed that they have doubled or tripled staffing levels, worked weekends and contracted with third parties to process applications as quickly as possible. But Labor Department data shows only eight states are currently processing the bulk of new applications and sending out payments in three weeks, which was the standard time before the pandemic. “We are still dealing with twice the normal number of claims even today, nine months into the pandemic, while simultaneously continuing to plow through the record onslaught of claims that came in the door from March to June,” said Bret Crow, communications director at the Ohio Department of Job and Family Services.
Ohio has hired 150 new unemployment claim adjudicators and more than a thousand call center agents. Even so, Ohio is among many states that have still not been able to achieve pre-pandemic processing times.
New Jersey is another state that has been proactive in beefing up staff and upgrading its systems. But unemployed people still fall through the cracks.
Martin Jones, 39, of Camden, N.J., lost his security guard job in late May and applied for unemployment in June. But there was a glitch: New Jersey kept sending him letters asking why he wanted to resurrect an old claim from the summer of 2019. Despite numerous phone calls explaining he was applying for aid in 2020, it has not been fixed. He was told to refile in September, which he did, but he’s still waiting for his first payment. “The very last person I talked to in November basically told me I should keep my fingers crossed and hope it eventually goes through,” Jones said. “I haven’t received a penny.”
Jones is diabetic and has been relying on charity from family members to buy the food and medicine he needs. In a recent trip to the store, he didn’t have enough money for toothpaste and deodorant.
New Jersey Department of Labor and Workforce Development spokeswoman Angela Delli Santi declined to comment on Jones’ case, but she said the state is seeing a lot of applications with missing information or a “complicating factor” that “often requires the assistance of an experienced agent.”
State unemployment offices stressed that most people still waiting for aid don’t qualify for the regular unemployment aid program. Instead, these people believe they qualify for the new program Congress created in March called Pandemic Unemployment Assistance, or “PUA,” that is meant to help gig workers, self-employed workers and parents who had to stop working to take care of a sick relative or watch a school-aged child when schools shut down in-person education.