State has high hopes for a new unemployment benefits system
It was another tale of pandemic frustration and deepening panic last year, as Danielle Quinones saw her desperate wait for an initial unemployment check extend throughout the summer.
Why would the experience of Quinones, a spa products entrepreneur in northernmost Maine, matter in Connecticut? Because Connecticut is next up to adopt the ReEmployUSA claims platform both states chipped in together to develop — but with the Maine system unleashing a flash flood of complaints similar to that of Connecticut’s archaic system in the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic.
In lockstep with the economy, DOL’s unemployment compensation system crashed a year ago, after hundreds of thousands of Connecticut residents attempted to file initial claims for benefits, with the number climbing past a million by October.
A grand total of roughly 580,000 individuals in Connecticut received unemployment assistance, with many of those claims representing double- or triple-filings, as workers people bounced on and off unemployment.
The culprit? A mainframe-era database that a parade of Democrat and Republican governors had failed to prioritize for upgrades among other information technology investments during the internet era.
An untold number of Connecticut residents paid the price last spring for those decades of neglect, waiting on unemployment checks that for many took six weeks to process. DOL ended up jury rigging an overlay system over the following months, while getting caught up on the backlog of claims delays.
The interim system is now cutting checks in three days or less, save for claims requiring extra attention for whatever reason. Entering March, about 212,000 Connecticut workers were receiving unemployment assistance as reported by the U.S. Department of Labor.
Kurt Westby, Connecticut’s labor commissioner who orchestrated the emergency steps even while staff were relegated to working remotely, expressed confidence Monday that the ReEmployUSA system will have the kinks worked out when Connecticut switches over to it in June 2022. That is more than a year behind the original target date of this spring, due to interrupted preparations as DOL staff switched gears to coaxing the old databases through the crisis.
“We cannot have this happen again,” Westby said Monday in a telephone interview from DOL’s Wethersfield office. “We cannot have a system that’s breaking down on a regular basis. We have to have a modernized system.”
But the breakdowns occurred as well with Maine’s switch to ReEmployUSA, both at the outset in 2017 and again last year. Quinones was among those who went public with frustration, telling the Bangor Daily News last September of her prolonged vigil even as bills piled up alongside an eviction notice.
Westby acknowledged that Maine had struggles with ReEmployUSA when implementing for the first time several years ago, but said the system worked “pretty well” compared to other systems nationally during the pandemic. Mississippi led development of the original system, reportedly the first to use cloud internet technology among departments of labor nationally.
“Every state in the country including the territories had major issues with that initial influx,” Westby said. “Every state was completely overrun. Remember, there has to be a certain amount of human intervention to make sure they are legitimate claims . ... All the [labor departments] in the entire country were obviously walloped, and none of them could have been completely prepared, even with a completely modernized system.”
Against the U.S. Department of Labor’s benchmark of three weeks to distribute checks for at least 87 percent of initial claims, Connecticut was below the 60 percent mark as of June before starting to climb slowly back toward compliance with the federal standard. It attained it only this past January according to Employment and Training Administration data, but with a small percentage of cases still stretching several weeks beyond.
“When people call in with an issue or email with an issue, they are often very complicated issues,” Westby said. “The federal laws and the state laws are extremely complicated, so it’s not easy to get a simple answer. Everyone wants a simple answer and everyone wants their money today — and the frustration often comes with not being able to deliver that because an individual maybe typed in the wrong number on their Social Security, or an individual had earnings in New York.”
Or maybe the individual was a crook looking to siphon off a small piece of the $7.5 billion in unemployment compensation DOL was funneling into the economy. Both Maine and Mississippi had comparatively low instances of “improper claims” during the pandemic among instances DOL has been able to flag to date, whether the result of people drawing benefits after resuming regular work or fraudulent means like identity theft.
“We can’t just open up the spigot, like people were saying [last] March — ‘Just pay them and worry about it later,’” Westby said. “You can’t do that, because organized crime is a serious challenge.”