Why California's unemployment system devolved into chaos during pandemic A new report examines the failures of California’s Employment Development Department to help residents obtain their unemployment benefits during the COVID-19 pandemic
Christine White filed for unemployment on March 30, two weeks after her home state of California entered shelter-in-place due to the COVID-19 pandemic, and didn’t hear back for a month.“I’m in sales, so I’m pretty persistent,” White said. “On any given day, I was calling 70 times in a row. One time I was on hold for eight hours — around 6 p.m. or 7 p.m., they stopped taking calls. I got a message saying they were closed. I cried.
“ California EDD has reported backlogs of residents who filed a first-time unemployment claim has built as high as 658,565 on Sept 27, equivalent to the population of Portland, Ore. ” “EDD had a culture of prioritizing fraud above all else,” Assemblymember David Chiu, D-San Francisco, told MarketWatch.
In California, EDD throughout the pandemic has sought to proactively avoid having to recover illegitimate payments “by flagging claims for further identity verification,” the strike team report found. How California is trying to fix its system Before the strike team began working on its 45-day investigative report on improving EDD, Newsom promised to deliver better service to Californians. The two-week pause on new claims, which was recommended by the strike team, angered residents.
ID.me was supposed to increase the share of claims that could be automatically processed from 60% to 91%. People who are skilled COBOL coders are “really smart people who know how to rework and, and kind of MacGyver the system,” Oates said. However, she added that “they’re fixing things with chewing gum and dental floss.”
Over time, many states have shifted away from COBOL to cloud computing as workers who are fluent in the programming language increasingly retire, Michele Evermore, a senior policy analyst at the National Employment Law Project, an advocacy organization focused on workers’ rights, told MarketWatch. Rhode Island began the process of shifting most of its operations to Amazon Web Services AMZN, -1.97% cloud computing software, realizing early on that their systems which were coded in COBOL would not be able to handle the predicted influx of jobless applications.
His team refers to the interface as a “pizza tracker” because users will be able to follow their claims “the way that you follow your Domino’s Pizza order.”“This is where it is, the drivers got lost, but she found her way, and it’s gonna be there in a little while,” he said metaphorically referring to checking the status of your unemployment claim.
Jensen assigned more employees to the call center. But — unlike earlier in the pandemic when Amazon Web Services wasn’t being used — his team received detailed data reports on which phone numbers were generating the majority of the calls.
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