DeSantis: 97.6% of job claims paid
Governor defends troubled state system and ineligible claims
Gov. Ron DeSantis defended the state’s beleaguered unemployment system Tuesday, saying 97.6% of valid individual claims have been paid, despite the almost half a million of them filed with some kind of mistake or by people who aren’t eligible.
But emails and calls to the Orlando Sentinel and other media outlets across Florida show a continued frustration with the system, with many saying they did everything right but still have not been paid two months into the coronavirus pandemic.
As he has done many times before, DeSantis acknowledged the $77 million system was never meant to process more than 1,000 claims at one time, with a surge capacity of 5,000. Instead, more than 2 million claims have been filed since March 15.
“When you’re in a situation like this, that’s the equivalent of throwing a jalopy into the Daytona 500,” DeSantis said. “It’s just not going to cut it.”
While total claims exceeded 2 million, DeSantis said many were duplicates created by people trying to access the mobile site when the main CONNECT site wasn’t working.
There have been close to 1.6 million individual claims in the last 10 weeks. About 172,000 are in the verification process and about 468,000 are ineligible.
Of the almost 1 million eligible claims that have been verified, he said, 975,650 have been paid nearly $2.7 billion.
That number, he said, is greater than the total combined unemployment claims Florida paid out from 2015 to 2019.
DeSantis listed some of the reasons why so many were ineligible, including failure to fill out the entire application, out-of-state residency or applicants being independent contractors.
“Obviously you’ve got to complete the application,” DeSantis said. “So if you don’t have a last name, you don’t have a Social Security number, you know, that’s going to be problematic.”