For EDD, pressure on to fix system

More than one million unemployed workers in state might not be paid for months

A majority of the California Legislature demanded Wednesday that the state pay hundreds of thousands of unemployed workers now rather than wait for the embattled Employment Development Department to figure out how to fix its broken benefits system.

Jolted by disclosures that more than 1 million California workers — some without payments since mid-March — may have to wait at least two more months before receiving jobless benefits, 61 state lawmakers from both legislative houses called on Gov. Gavin Newsom to launch immediate fixes and sweeping long-term reforms of the EDD.

In a letter to the governor, the state lawmakers blasted the EDD’s “shocking inability” to process claims and sounded as frustrated as the newly jobless, who complain of unanswered or never returned phone calls and crashing webpages.

“It has been nearly impossible to get straight answers from EDD on most inquiries,” the letter said. “In countless public and private settings, when we have asked for simple, factual information — such as how many claims have remained unfulfilled, for how long, in different categories, rejected for what reasons — we have been met with long-winded excuses, fumbling non-answers,

or unclear and inconsistent data.”

At the heart of the matter: an estimate from the state’s Employment Development Department that at least 1.13 million unemployed California workers are not receiving payments — although they might be eligible to be paid — because they are trapped in an EDD-created bureaucratic limbo.

Of those, 889,000 unemployed California workers “may be eligible with additional information” in the EDD’s view, while 239,000 other workers have filed claims that are “pending EDD resolution.”

“There are millions of Californians going without income due to the failures at EDD,” Assembly member David Chiu, D-San Francisco, said Wednesday. “We need to see sweeping reforms that lead to immediate improvements.” Chiu has become one of EDD’s harshest critics in the state Legislature.

The EDD says it requires two months — until the end of September — to process and pay the 239,000 workers. At that pace, payments to 889,000 workers might take seven months to complete.

One solution proposed by the legislators: Find ways to make some payments immediately, even if a claim might have some problems being officially certified.

“As claimants suffer without income while EDD slowly makes its way through the queue of backlogged claims, EDD should provide many of them with at least initial or partial benefits,” the letter said.

If necessary, the EDD could later scrutinize a claim and issue an overpayment notice to the affected worker.

“The assumption should be that the vast majority of claimants have legitimate claims to what they are owed,” the state lawmakers wrote.

Estimates posted by the U.S. Labor Department — based largely on data the EDD supplied — place the backlog of unpaid claims payments during March, April and May as high as 1.88 million.

“Our constituents have waited long enough to get the benefits they are legally entitled to,” Chiu said.

The unemployed must navigate the EDD’s broken call center, which rarely responds to inbound telephone calls. They also must battle an EDD website hobbled by a three-decade-old computer programming language called Cobol, a technology deemed archaic by today’s standards.

“Millions of our constituents have had no income for months,” the state lawmakers wrote. “As Californians wait for answers from EDD, they have depleted their life savings, have gone into extreme debt, and are in a deep panic as they figure out how to put food on the table and a roof over their heads.”

Last week, just ahead of a legislative hearing to address the EDD’s ineffectiveness, Newsom announced a “strike team” of experts to address the department’s problems and come up with a solution within 45 days.

The state lawmakers said those efforts are inadequate.

“We appreciate that you just announced actions to address a few of the many issues we have highlighted for months,” the lawmakers wrote to the governor. “Unfortunately, this only scratches the surface of the disaster that is EDD.”

The EDD and the governor’s office didn’t respond Wednesday to a request for a comment about the letter.

However last week, in a comment that provided little comfort to unemployed workers, Loree Levy, a principal spokesperson for the state EDD, said that it’s up to the 889,000 workers to provide the necessary information to successfully obtain payment for their claims.

“We can’t approve these claims at this time,” Levy said.

That sort of response, a stance backed up by EDD director Sharon Hilliard, dismayed lawmakers.

“We were astonished when Director Hilliard only committed to resolving the 239,000 ‘pending’ claims by the end of September,” the lawmakers stated. “We hear from many of the 899,000 struggling Californians who ‘may be eligible with additional information’ that EDD’s online portal does not tell them what more information is needed.”

Burt Milburn, an Antioch resident who lost his job as a flooring specialist, received two payments totaling $737 a week a few weeks ago after waiting months for those first benefits to arrive.

Then the payments immediately stopped after the initial round.

“The EDD is giving me nothing now,” Milburn said. “Nothing is happening. I can’t get any information from them.”