State productivity level declines despite hiring
SACRAMENTO >> The California unemployment agency’s two call centers to field questions about jobless benefits had two major problems as millions of people sought help due to the pandemic: One had nobody on site to answer calls and the other had hundreds of untrained new hires who didn’t know how to help callers.
The result was about 600,000 callers each month “waiting on hold for hours without a statistically significant chance of being served,” according to a review of the Employment Development
Department that found widespread problems that greatly hindered its ability to deal with record jobless claims.
The report detailed the problems that have plagued the agency since March, when the government suddenly ordered businesses to close and people to stay in their homes to slow the spread of the coronavirus. To date, more than 13 million claims have been filed and the agency has doled out about $86 billion in benefits.
The problems at the call centers are indicative of the outdated technology and lack of oversight the review found.
One of the call centers is in a field office with phones that can’t be forwarded. So when the pandemic hit and employees began to work from home, there was no one to answer millions of calls at the office.
The phone number that routed callers to the center averaged 6.7 million calls per week in July. A recorded message sent callers to a second call center for help, but that center was staffed by the new hires who did not have the training or the experience to help them.
Frustrated claimants are finding and sharing other agency phone numbers not meant for the public, including the phone line for the hearing or speech-impaired.
“If this pattern continues, every employee with a telephone will be overwhelmed with calls,” the review noted.
Meanwhile, about 1.6 million people are waiting for EDD to process their claims — a number that is growing by about 10,000 claims per day. The agency had set a goal to resolve that backlog by the end of this month, but now says it won’t happen before the end of January.
“I am concerned this is too little, too late for Californians experiencing extreme financial stress as a result of EDD’s failures,” Democratic Assemblyman David Chiu said Monday.
The review, ordered by Gov. Gavin Newsom in July, showed how the agency made things worse as it tried to make things better. The agency either hired or redirected more than 1,300 people to process claims. But the agency pulled away its most senior employees to train the workers, causing productivity to decline.
Plus, it takes years to train workers to do the specialized work required to process claims. The agency has hired 515 new workers to recalculate disputed claims, but so far none of them have had any work to do.
EDD has a computer system to automatically process claims. But the agency is diverting about 40% of those claims to a much slower manual review process to identify and stop fraud. The agency can handle about 2,400 manual claims per day, but it’s getting more than 20,000.
Meanwhile, the manual reviews are not stopping fraud. Most of the fraudulent claims are so sophisticated they sail right through the computer system and are never marked for manual review.