Agency’s accidental job creation
The state Employment Development Department’s persistent failure to reliably answer its phones has spawned a new kind of business devoted to overcoming its incompetence. This wasn’t how California’s unemployment agency was supposed to ease the economic devastation of the pandemic.
Providing the latest evidence that the extraordinary demands of the COVIDinduced downturn only exacerbated EDD’s longstanding mismanagement, The Chronicle reported that Bay Area companies are charging beleaguered claimants $20 to $80 to get through to EDD for them, using automatic dialing technology to repeatedly call the agency until they get an answer. Although pandemic closures and joblessness are gradually abating, the department’s own job performance is somehow growing worse.
Since March, the share of calls to the agency going unanswered has more than doubled to nearly a third of those received. The overall number of calls has also multiplied, suggesting the autodialers are compounding EDD’s difficulties answering them.
Don’t blame the capitalists, though: They’re only responding to the demands of desperate Californians who deserve better from their government. The unanswered calls are far from the only sign of continuing disarray at the agency, which has also seen its backlog of claims mount in recent weeks. From early April to late May, the number of applications for unemployment assistance waiting at least three weeks for a response roughly doubled to over 200,000. That’s not close to the levels seen at the height of the crisis, but it’s not encouraging, either.
The agency’s losing battle to keep up with calls and claims stands in contrast to its ready payment of at least $11 billion and as much as $30 billion in benefits in the names of serial killers and other obviously illegitimate applicants, creating a whole other cottage industry.
Nor is the EDD the only state agency whose dysfunction has become a business in its own right. Companies also sprang up to help Californians secure appointments with the Department of Motor Vehicles as it struggled to provide more secure driver’s licenses.
Nearly a year after Gov. Gavin Newsom created a “strike force” to fix the unemployment agency, he and legislators are poised to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to help EDD address its backlog, modernize obsolete technology and provide a directdeposit alternative to its troubled Bank of America debit cards, an option already available in most states. We’ll know the governor and lawmakers have done their job when they put the professional dialers out of work.