State’s unemployment benefits system improving
Florida lags in paying claims when compared with other states
TALLAHASSEE — Gov. Ron DeSantis has touted the progress of the beleaguered unemployment system in paying out claims, but Florida still lags other states half its size in getting desperately needed money to the jobless.
DeSantis told reporters Friday the system was “broken” in early April but noted significant improvements since, with the state distributing more than $3.7 billion to 1 million recipients since midMarch, when local shutdown orders due to the coronavirus led to the initial wave of widespread unemployment claims that flooded the system.
“Those payments are coming in,” DeSantis said. “The fact that we have over a million is very important because when this system broke it was a really difficult situation for a lot of people, and I surged more resources than anything we’ve ever done on a domestic issue.”
Critics of DeSantis and the unemployment system’s performance acknowledge the progress but say he’s painting too rosy of a picture, since thousands of claimants still remain unpaid.
“There are still people coming to my inbox — hundreds of people that don’t have any revenue coming in and they applied in March,” said Rep. Anna Eskamani, D-Orlando, “They’re doing everything right so the governor’s rhetoric just doesn’t make sense. It doesn’t accurately reflect what’s happening on the ground whatsoever.”
Despite the progress, other states half of Florida’s size are processing similar amounts of claims in less time.
In next-door Georgia, for instance, the state processed more than 2 million claims between March 21 and May 16, compared
with the 1.6 million claims processed in Florida between March 15 and May 28, three weeks more than the Georgia timeline.
Georgia’s payments have totaled more than $3 billion, and while Florida has paid out $3.7 billion, the amount paid by the states, instead of by the federal government as part of the CARES Act, is similar: $1.08 billion in Florida and $926.8 million in Georgia.
Georgia has 10.6 million people, less than half of Florida’s 22 million.
In Michigan, a state with 9.66 million people, the state has paid out $5.6 billion to 1.3 million workers through May 14.
California has nearly double Florida’s population with 39.5 million people, but has paid out $16 billion in claims through May 21, more than four times as much as Florida.
Part of the discrepancy is because those states pay higher maximum weekly payments than Florida, where claimants can only receive up to $275 per week. California’s maximum payment is $450, Georgia’s is $365 and Michigan’s is $362. But Michigan has also paid out more claims than Florida’s 1 million.
Applicants are currently receiving an extra $600 per week paid by Washington under the CARES Act, but that expires July 31.
A comprehensive comparison of how Florida’s system has fared in relation to other states is difficult because of the lag time the U.S. Department of Labor has in reporting in-depth statistics for jobless benefits. In the most recent data available, Florida had a recipiency rate — the amount of people receiving benefits compared with the total unemployed — of 7.6 percent in the fourth quarter of 2019, the lowest among states.
Florida has received 2.2 million claims, according to DEO, and 1.98 million have been confirmed as unique.
The 1.6 million claims processed and 1 million claims paid is a significant improvement on the 6 percent of claims paid in the early weeks of the crisis.
DeSantis has said many of the remaining problems arise from user error such as Social Security numbers not entered or incomplete forms submitted.
But users of CONNECT, the state’s system, report it often doesn’t work at all, and is ridden with glitches when it does. And when it works correctly, an excess amount of red tape makes getting payments cumbersome.
And even when the payment comes there can be problems. Eskamani said she’s received emails from constituents who struggled to file in March or April, or were initially deemed ineligible, but were approved when they tried again in May. But the payment only reflected the weeks unemployed in May and their attempts to get retroactive benefits have gone unfulfilled so far.
One area where Florida compares favorably with other states has been its ability to handle the historic surge in claims. Florida had $4 billion in its jobless benefits fund when the crisis began, far more than other states and double the $2 billion it had when the Great Recession hit in 2008.
During that crisis, Florida had to borrow $2 billion from the federal government to cover claims, and other states could soon run out of funds as unemployment numbers continue to climb.
However, critics contend that cushion also came at the expense of denying benefits to more out of work Floridians before the pandemic hit.
DeSantis himself has slammed the CONNECT system he inherited from his predecessor Rick Scott, now a U.S. senator, and has ordered an investigation by his inspector general into the matter. But Eskamani and other Democrats note he ignored an audit from last year detailing many of the problems with the system.
“I’ve [compared] it to putting a jalopy on a Daytona 500 track; it just wasn’t built for this,” DeSantis said. “It requires constant upkeep to be able to do it and process
the money for folks.”