Legal Aid offers help as jobless claims rise
Tony Kelso’s world began to unravel on March 18, 2020.
On that date, all barbershops and hair salons in Ohio were required to close their doors by a state Department of Health directive in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Kelso’s Barber Shop on Sullivant Avenue on the Hilltop had been in operation for seven years, allowing him to provide for himself, pay the rent for the shop and for his apartment, and even contribute to the neighborhood by sponsoring youth sports teams.
With no clear end in sight for the shutdown of his and similar businesses, Kelso found himself applying for unemployment benefits. Or at least trying.
Although he wasn’t eligible for traditional benefits as a self-employed individual, he was covered by the Pandemic Unemployment Assistance program under the federal CARES Act, which became available in May.
The 37-year-old West Side resident spent weeks encountering delays with his application and seeking answers from the Ohio Department of Job and Family Services, which processes and oversees unemployment claims.
Kelso had lost his shop and his apartment and was living with family by the time a friend suggested that he contact the Legal Aid Society of Columbus, which provides free legal assistance in civil matters for those who meet low-income eligibility requirements.
He reached out to Legal Aid at the end of July. By the middle of August, his application to the state for unemployment benefits had been approved, along with 24 weeks of back pay.
Kelso has since found a new location for his barbershop on Georgesville Road on the West Side, and hopes to have it ready to open soon.
“It was such a blessing when it finally came through,” he said of his unemployment benefits. “But it’s a shame that you have to get Legal Aid to help you get what is supposed to be yours.”
Kelso was part of a surge in requests for help with unemployment claims that Legal Aid fielded after the pandemic hit in March 2020.
The Columbus office had opened 57 unemployment compensation cases for Franklin County clients in 2019, a relatively normal year, according to Kate Mcgarvey, executive director of the Ohio State Legal Services Association,
which is the umbrella organization that includes the Legal Aid Society of Columbus.
In 2020, she said, unemployment compensation cases grew to 414. “We opened over seven times as many cases in 2020 as in 2019,” Mcgarvey said. “It went from being the 21st-most common type of case for us in 2019 to the thirdmost common case last year.”
Legal Aid offices across the state are equally busy with pandemic-driven unemployment cases, said Angela Lloyd, executive director of the Ohio Access to Justice Foundation, a nonprofit group that provides funding for the agencies.
“The biggest number we’ve been quoting is that around the state, Legal Aid work on unemployment issues increased by 400%,” she said.
The type of unemployment assistance provided by Legal Aid has changed during the surge, said Ben Horne, advocacy director for the Columbus office.
Before the pandemic, unemployment cases for Legal Aid typically involved representing clients who were appealing denials of their unemployment claims.
“We represent them before the Unemployment Compensation Review Commission, where there’s a hearing officer and we put on evidence in a sort of pseudo trial, and perhaps appeal the case in court,” Horne said.
After the pandemic began, Legal Aid found itself doing more “technical” assistance related to simply applying for benefits from Job and Family Services, which was overwhelmed with unemployment claims from across the state related to the pandemic.
“So many of the calls we were getting were from people struggling to navigate the system, struggling even to get through to someone they could talk to,” he said. “We were helping them access online applications and figure out what was causing delays in getting approved for benefits.”
Some of the biggest problems have occurred for those in the Pandemic Unemployment Assistance program.
Fraud became so rampant in that program that Job and Family Services put a hold on 270,000 claims for benefits in August while investigating them for potential fraudulent activity. That process has slowed to a crawl what already was a system fraught with delays.
Bret Crow, a spokesman for Ohio Job and Family Services, said the agency is “aggressively” working to find solutions to claims-processing and fraud-detection issues through a public-private partnership that includes “top banking and insurance companies.”
“We will provide an update on that work as soon as we can,” he said.
For now, a demanding verification process is in place for individuals to establish that their claims are legitimate. Legal Aid Societies are uniquely positioned to help their clients in that process, Lloyd said.
“The beauty of civil Legal Aid Societies is they have preexisting relationships with Job and Family Services,” she said. “They essentially can serve as a verification tool for Job and Family Services, to let them know that this is a legitimate claim and get these cases resolved.”
But the demands on Job and Family Services remain overwhelming enough that the Columbus Legal Aid Society doesn’t expect the issues to be resolved or frustrations to abate for clients anytime soon.
“Unfortunately, we’ve had clients say, ‘I’m just going to give up. It’s not worth it,’ ” staff attorney Kristy Michel said. “I tell them to hang on, we’ll get through this. They deserve these benefits; they qualify for them. But when they have to jump through hoop after hoop after hoop, it just gets tiring.”
Those seeking help from the Legal Aid Society of Columbus can do so online at columbuslegalaid.org/contactus/ or by calling 614-241-2001. jfutty@dispatch.com @johnfutty