Officials: Jobless system is working smoothly
Applicants still facing issues, late payments
A week after Pennsylvania launched an upgraded unemployment compensation system, nearly 400,000 people have filed for benefits using the new cloud-based program or the file-by-phone system.
That’s practically equal to the population of Pittsburgh and Erie combined, said Jennifer Berrier, acting secretary for the state’s Department of Labor and Industry.
It also matches up with the number of claims the department saw in the weeks leading up the system launch, Ms. Berrier said, a sign that the launch went smoothly, and the system is working as it should.
“We believe the majority of individuals are successfully able to log in and file using the new system,” Ms. Berrier said at a news conference Wednesday. “Paying out $300 million in eight days will help those out-of-work Pennsylvanians put food on their tables and strengthen our economy.”
Barney Oursler, co-chair of the Mon Valley Unemployed Committee, which helps people file for benefits and resolve issues with their claims, said state’s assessment doesn’t match what he’s hearing from claimants.
A week since the launch, he said many people still can’t get into the system or are running into problems after months of successfully filing for benefits.
“It just seems to compound every day with more problems,” he said. “What we’re seeing is just kind of a cascading set of glitches.
“They use that word because it sounds small. It’s not small. It’s systemwide.”
Different experiences
Pennsylvania launched its new unemployment system — a project nearly 20 years in the making — last Tuesday, June 8, in an effort to make it easier and faster for workers and employers to navigate the system. It replaced a decades-old mainframe system with a cloud-based one that’s meant to make the process more efficient.
Ahead of the launch, which was delayed to avoid any disruptions to Pennsylvanians filing for jobless benefits, both tech experts and workers advocates worried about glitches in the system that could prevent people from receiving benefits they still relied on.
Immediately after the launch, claimants took to social media to voice their concerns.
Some said they couldn’t log on, others said they received messages that they were inactive or ineligible. Many said they were having trouble reaching anyone at the unemployment center to answer their questions — something that claimants have struggled with since the first business closures and shutdown orders led to a surge in unemployment claims.
Ms. Berrier said Wednesday the department had experienced an uptick in calls to its customer service phone lines after the transition and during the last week.
A week after the launch, she said she was confident the department had “ironed out all the system issues. Now it’s a matter of education and providing some instruction to individuals,” she said.
Mr. Oursler disagreed. He’s heard from claimants who are having trouble setting up a new ID to get in the system and, once they do, being told it is wrong or that they aren’t recognized in the system.
Others are being asked to prove they are looking for work, a requirement that government officials waived at the start of the pandemic and isn’t set to go in effect until July. Some claimants say the system tells them they are “disqualified.”
On Twitter, many users posted on the department’s feed that their claims were “still processing” after several days and that they had not received the weekly benefit they were expecting.
“The bottom line is so you signed up, but unless you get your check in the mail or into your account or on your debit card, then it’s not real,” Mr. Oursler said.
“We think their first level problem is signing up, which is pretty disastrous it appears ... But then the second level of outrage is going to come when people don’t get the checks when they regularly were getting them [before the new system launch.]”
Texting and adding staff
To help speed up communication between the department and claimants, Ms. Berrier said the state was launching a new texting feature Thursday.
Through the new system, tem, a staffer at the unemployment center will text claimants to give them a time frame to expect a phone call from the department. The goal is to eliminate missed calls and extra time spent trying to get a hold of one another.
Pennsylvania announced in February it intended to launch a similar program later that month.
The department is also bringing on an additional 200 customer service representatives next week to help answer phone lines and address claimants’ questions. It has been hiring more staffers since March, part of an effort to improve communication and decrease a backlog in unemployment claims.
Ms. Berrier said the department was making progress on getting through the claims that were still awaiting eligibility determinations, something that advocates have been pushing for for months.
Advocacy groups across the state are urging the department to pay benefits out to the nearly 300,000 people who have been waiting weeks or months to hear whether they are eligible for jobless benefits. The department says it believes that many of those claims are fraudulent and that federal law prohibits them from paying benefits ahead of a determination.
On Wednesday, Ms. Berrier said the claims examiners “were able to accomplish a great deal of adjudications, which was promising compared to the numbers under the old system.” She said the department would provide more information on the backlog and the timeline to get through those claims in the coming weeks.
Advocates for claimants and workers aren’t buying that. “Every month we’ve seen the backlog increase,” Mr. Oursler said. “We’ve seen no evidence that they’re even keeping up.”
In April — the most recent data available — Pennsylvania and Pittsburgh’s unemployment rate was 7.4%.
Of the more than 6.3 million people in Pennsylvania’s labor force, about 466,000 individuals were still out of work.
About 393,000 people filed for jobless benefits using the new system in the eight days since it launched, according to state officials.