State warns backlog of jobless cases may persist
Thousands in Wisconsin waiting for unemployment payments
Despite the hiring of hundreds of new employees, the Department of Workforce Development is still struggling to tackle hundreds of thousands of unpaid claims for those who lost their jobs due to the COVID-19 pandemic and warns backlogs may persist into mid-August.
Michelle Wright had to leave her job at the beginning of the outbreak, on recommendations from her doctor, in order to protect her 11-year-old immunocompromised daughter.
Wright was going to nursing school part-time, and working as a nursing assistant at the time, and left her job to keep her daughter safe and healthy as the risk from the virus grew. She’s been waiting since March 19 for money from unemployment, she said, and there aren’t any signs that the department is going to solve the issues soon.
See UNEMPLOYMENT, Page 17A
Since the state reopened, Wright has been applying for and interviewing for jobs, and has a second-round interview in the coming days. But she’s worried that her car may be repossessed before then.
“My concern is walking out of my house and my car is gone,” she said. “I need my car to get to interviews.”
Luckily, her landlord has been understanding of the situation, Wright said, so she’s not worried about her housing. But there are other bills.
“I believe this is a bigger issue. How can you wait and be patient when your phone is blowing up with bill collectors?” she said. “It puts all of us in a bad situation.”
Wright is only one of thousands still waiting for answers from the Department of Workforce Development, as it works through a backlog of unpaid claims.
‘A big mountain to climb’
So far, the department has hired 334 people to help staff the unemployment division, and is still recruiting for 13 more positions. Some of those hires will be considered “temporary” and won’t work beyond the end of the flood of pandemic-related claims, but others will stay on permanently, said Emily Savard, a policy analyst for the unemployment insurance division of the department.
In addition to the hires by the department, there are also contracts with three different call centers, which will add over 800 people to answer calls and help with adjudication, she said.
The department is battling to get through the backlog of unpaid claims, but there are always new claims coming in, she said. Employees are focusing on older claims first, trying to tackle them in the order they came in.
“The biggest reason for taking as long as it has, there were 240,000 cases filed between March 15 and March 31. The number of cases in those weeks is the reason we have such a workload,” she said. “That was a big mountain to climb.”
Savard said that the department is hoping to return to “normal” by mid-August, meaning that all claims related to the pandemic will have been addressed. That doesn’t mean that claimants who filed in March will be waiting until August to hear from an adjudicator, she said.
Despite the growing number of employees, the department still hasn’t been enough to get through the backlog of claims. According to the department website, nearly 3.2 million weekly claims have been received by the department since March 15, but only about 2.3 million have been paid. That leaves 859,399 unpaid weekly claims, up from 795,305 from the last total on June 6.
More than 373,000 of those claims, she said, have been denied and will never be paid. But more than 486,000 of those weekly claims are being held for adjudication, meaning that those recipients are waiting for someone to take
their claims and call them back.
Those claims belong to about 151,000 unique claimants, Savard said. Mostly, the increases week over week are an accumulation of claims made by those who have to go through an adjudicator to resolve an issue with their application, she said. As of now, the department has 259 adjudicators, 65 loaner staff helping with adjudication, and 153 call center staff members helping with adjudication, with the goal of 200 by the end of the month, Savard said.
Another concern that remains, even if the department is able to get through the mountain of unpaid claims, is whether it will be able to handle a second wave of furloughs and business closures if coronavirus cases were to spike again.
Savard believes that the department would be able to avoid the backlog, thanks to lessons learned.
“I think having been through this unprecedented situation, we’ve had points where we’ve learned and takeaways to take forward,” she said.
No magic fix
Lawmakers say they are still trying to help constituents.
State Sen. André Jacque, R-De Pere, has been working since the beginning of the COVID-19 outbreak to help his constituents and others who contact him get their benefits.
Since the call centers came online, he’s noticed that more people are contacting his office to let him know that they got their payments. But new requests for help are still coming in, he said. On Tuesday alone he heard from five new people.
Some cases are more severe than others, Jacque said, with people at risk of losing their homes or cars. In some cases, he’s had to give out information about food banks and other resources so that callers don’t go hungry.
“You just have to give them information on things they never considered before,” he said.
Jacque said that he wished that unemployment would have been handled differently from the beginning, possibly
with more state employees being transferred to the agency more quickly, or even updates to information technology. But he doesn’t know if any fixes would have been able to address the crush of claims that came in.
“I don’t know that there’s a magic fix,” he said.
But some lawmakers have been more critical.
Sen. Steve Nass, R-Whitewater, issued a press release Tuesday calling for Mark Reihl, the division administrator for unemployment insurance, to resign immediately or be fired.
“For weeks, it has been evident that the poor leadership provided by Mark Reihl in his duty to manage the unemployment insurance program has greatly harmed many citizens of this state in receiving vital benefits in a timely manner. His disastrous management continues today impacting more than 151,000 claimants that still have not received benefits or an explanation for denial,” Nass said in the release.
Rep. Evan Goyke, D-Milwaukee, said that like all state legislators, he’s been hearing from a lot of constituents needing help with unemployment, but that number has started to slow now. But he doesn’t believe that calling on the administrator to leave is the solution, especially because there have been longstanding issues with unemployment.
“That’s the opposite of leadership,” he said.
Even with the slowing number of calls, there’s still a need for changes to prevent situations like these from occurring again, he said. Solutions could range from investing in a new unemployment system to permanently getting rid of the waiting period on unemployment benefits.
Lawmakers have known since 2007 that the state’s unemployment system needed technical upgrades, and in 2014 an audit showed that up to 80% of calls to the Department of Workforce Development were blocked because of the system’s limits during a major recession.
“Going forward, I’m hoping this was the lesson that we needed,” he said.
‘Sit tight and wait’
Mary Luce started filing for unemployment four weeks ago, when she was furloughed from her University of Wisconsin System job. Her claim was immediately flagged because she works for an educational institution, but she’s not a teacher or a professor, and she works every month of the year, she said.
While professors are on their summer break and typically don’t qualify for unemployment, the other staff at universities don’t get those breaks, Luce said. She’s been trying to get through to someone that she can explain that to at the department but has been unable to talk to anyone who can help. When she has gotten through to someone on the phone line, she’s been told that they can’t help her.
“They can’t tell anyone anything, other than what’s listed on the unemployment site,” she said. “So why are you letting people call when you can’t answer anything?”
Luce said that at one point when she called, she was told to “sit tight and wait.”
“I’m not a sit tight and wait kind of person,” she said.
She knows that other people within the university are likely facing the same issue, and are waiting on a resolution. While Luce is doing OK right now and her husband is still working, she’s still worried.
“I’m worried about paying my bills,” she said. “But I’m not specifically asking for them to fix mine. I want them to fix them all.”