The Oregon Employment Department appears to be changing its approach to paying regular unemployment claims trapped in a lengthy review process.
Tens of thousands of claims are currently in the process known as adjudication.
Now, a subset of those will be paid proactively – even before adjudication ends. That means some Oregonians stuck in claims purgatory could get paid sooner.
The new policy was outlined in a memo sent to staff Thursday, though OED officials were not immediately available to comment on it.
Adjudication is the agency’s process for resolving certain claims issues, such as whether a person’s reason for leaving a job disqualifies them from collecting unemployment insurance benefits, often referred to as UI. For thousands of desperate Oregonians, adjudication has become a black hole.
In recent weeks, OED acting director David Gerstenfeld has said that adjudicating a claim can delay its processing by 12-14 weeks.
The department memo announcing the policy change put the wait time higher: four months.
“The current wait time of 16 weeks is counter to the agency’s core mission of accurate and timely payment of UI benefits,” employment official Lisa Schriever wrote in a memo that multiple sources provided to OPB. “The pandemic brought about workloads never before experienced in UI.”
In the face of that crippling delay, the agency is now launching a “presumptive pay” program.
That means it will begin paying some Oregonians whose regular unemployment claims are still being adjudicated. To qualify for presumptive pay, claimants would need to be deemed eligible for a second benefits program, Pandemic Unemployment Assistance or PUA, if their conventional claim is denied. The memo states that applicants for presumptive pay should fill out a PUA application “with their COVID-19 impact reason and date.”
The federal CARES Act designed PUA benefits as a safety net for a range of people who do not qualify for regular unemployment benefits. That includes independent contractors, as well as people who have run out of regular benefits or have not worked enough hours to qualify for them.
OED leaders plan to use that safety net for their own policy of presumptive pay. The basic idea is to get payments rolling – and if a person ends up being denied for regular unemployment benefits, payments would be moved to PUA.
“We will release payment of regular UI benefits on the presumption they will be eligible for either regular UI or PUA benefits after we have adjudicated their claim issues,” Schriever wrote in the memo.
It was not immediately clear how extensively a claimant’s PUA application would have to be vetted to qualify for presumptive pay. The agency has struggled to work through tens of thousands of claims in that program’s backlog as well.
It was clear, however, that the new program will not apply to everyone still waiting for unemployment relief.
The agency plans to begin notifying claimants in adjudication that they should apply for PUA to be considered for presumptive pay. According to the memo, almost 6,000 people in adjudication already have PUA applications in the pipeline.
“There are approximately 5,900 PUA applications from customers awaiting adjudication,” the memo states. “We will begin reviewing their applications, and if they have a COVID-19 impact reason and date, we will release their regular UI benefits.”
The new policy does come with a risk for claimants: the risk of overpayment and possibly having to return money to the state.
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