LOCAL & STATE:
Secretary Jonathan Satter announced during a Facebook Live town hall that the Department of Economic Opportunity will be launching a tool to allow workers who applied for unemployment between March 9 and April 8 to collect retroactive pay.
Florida’s Department of Economic Opportunity is launching a new tool that will give workers the option for retroactive pay, a major question many have had since the state’s troubled unemployment system broke down last month, blocking some workers from applying for benefits for weeks. But there will be caveats.
During a Facebook Live discussion with state Sen. Jason Pizzo, D-North Miami Beach, and Sen. Jeff Brandes, R-St.Petersburg, DEO said it would be addressing the issue “very, very soon.” The conversation was with Jonathan Satter, secretary of the Department of Management Services, who was tapped by Gov.
to determine at what point workers should receive pay for a job loss.
But while the retroactive pay will kick in for state benefits, it might hinder how much workers get in federal benefits.
The tool has been delayed, Satter explained, because of the discrepancy between when state benefits and the additional, weekly $600 in federal benefits under the CARES Act go into effect.
Satter said that if a worker backdates an application to a date prior to March 29, the date federal benefits began, they may lose a portion of benefits available to them through the national program.
That’s because the federal and state dollars work in concert with each other. When state benefits run out, so do federal, even though workers are entitled to up to 12 weeks of federal dollars.
For example, if a worker applied for unemployment on March 29, they’d get 12 weeks of the state’s $275 maximum weekly payout and 12 weeks of the federal $600 maximum payout.
If a worker backdates their application to March 22, they’d receive 12 weeks of the state money and 11 weeks of the federal money.
The tool will include real-life examples to help workers decide what they want to do.
“We want to make sure people maximize the benefits available to them,” Satter said. He did not give a specific date for when the tool would be available.
The news conference came after another difficult week for DEO, when more than 200,000 workers were deemed ineligible for benefits — many of them still without explanation. The state has also started to roll out federal benefits, through a program known as the Pandemic Unemployment Assistance program, or PUA, which are available for independent contractors, gig workers, self-employed workers and those who were deemed ineligible for the state benefits.
Benefits under PUA are maxed out at $275 a week for 39 weeks plus an additional $600 a week through July 31.
As of Wednesday, DEO had processed 75% of claims, paid almost 46% of workers deemed eligible and found a separate 39% of workers who applied for assistance ineligible for state benefits.
Satter said Thursday there are “dozens and dozens” of reasons a worker may be found ineligible for benefits. But the department is going to work to ensure it explains that reasoning to each person, he said.
“We need to go back and make sure we have guided those people to all the potential programs that are available to them,” Satter said.
Communication from the department will come in the form the worker requested in their application, typically email or traditional mail.
For those still looking to apply, the secretary suggests putting as much information as possible in an application to help speed up processing. The best time to check in on the status of an application the CONNECT system is between 2:30 p.m. and 5 p.m. And the best number to call for updates is 1-833-FL-APPLY.