Californiaâs Employment Development Department will halt accepting unemployment claims until October 5 while it tackles a massive backlog of 600,000 cases, and retools its website to process new cases more quickly.
The announcement comes after a report highlighted the department’s need for a massive overhaul to meet the demand of millions of people who are out of work, according to a strike team assembled by Gov. Gavin Newsom, whose report on employment office reform published late Saturday.
The employment department needs to reform soon, the strike team noted, because its backlog is growing by 10,000 unemployment claims a day. That’s 10,000 Californians daily who file unemployment claims that may not be reviewed for months.
The department can only process about 2,400 claims per day.
“As long as the inbound rate of claims per day exceeds what the slowest, lowest throughput part of the system can complete in a day, the backlog of undetermined claims will grow unbounded until the new claims rate decreases,” the strike team wrote in the report.
In a letter to Newsom, Sharon Hilliard, director of the employment department, said the department’s “pause” would allow them to catch up with their backlog and implement new technologies, strategies, and protocols to tackle the overwhelming number of claims.
In the meantime, anyone filing an unemployment claim will be directed to a temporary website where they can leave their contact information, Hilliard wrote.
Since the pandemic began, the employment department has paid more than 12.6 million claims for unemployment benefits, including new federal programs providing pandemic assistance, according to the report.
Republicans took the report’s findings as an opportunity to skewer Newsom. In a statement on Twitter, the California GOP wrote, “Californiaâs Auditor warned @GavinNewsom LAST YEAR of Californians heightened risk of identity theft under the EDD. Newsom did nothing.”
Representatives from the California Government Operations Agency, the California Department of Technology and the California Office of Digital Innovation served on the team, which was assembled by Newsom in July.
The strike team’s 45-day review outlined ways the department’s technology systems can be more customer-focused and hiring goals to tackle the ever-growing backlog of claims.
More staff is needed, the report’s authors noted, as the employment division’s phone lines are overwhelmed. In one week in July the department netted 6.7 million phone calls, but only had 20 staffers available to handle the phones at any one time.
The employment department now plans to hire as many as 3,000 new staffers to handle phone calls, by October.
But the backlog takes priority. To that end, the strike team, led by Yolanda Richardson, government operations secretary, and Jennifer Pahlka, Code for America founder and former U.S. deputy chief technology officer, focused on finding ways to make legitimate unemployment claims move through the process quicker.
The team observed teams at work at EDD offices in Sacramento and Rancho Cordova, reviewed training materials and claimant communications, studied call center data, extracted and analyzed data from EDD’s many information technology systems and interviewed hundreds of people for their feedback and suggestions, including legislative members and staff.
Recommendations by the strike team included improving transparency, modernizing how documents are uploaded, establishing clear metrics to track claims and target source deployment and implementing a plan to reduce the backlog based on data, including increased use of outbound calling to claimants to resolve issues.These are just the short-term recommendations.
The long-term recommendations include launching a cross-disciplinary modernization project involving an overhaul of administrative rules and procedures, operations and technology, with the main focus on improving the experience of those filing for unemployment benefits.
Copyright 2020 KQED