California lawmakers questioned state labor officials Thursday amid mounting concerns about the government’s inability to pay unemployment claims that skyrocketed amid widespread trade closings, and learned that decades-old technologies underpin the payment system.
During a state legislative hearing on Thursday, the Employment Development Department was portrayed as inept and insensitive to the needs of unemployed workers who have lost their jobs in record numbers because state and local government agencies have ordered companies to shut down to help to control the coronavirus.
State EDD Director Sharon Hilliard told a state Assembly budget subcommittee Thursday that even the massive EDD hiring efforts that Governor Gavin Newsom and the state Department of Labor have announced will not address a core problem. in the agency: technology.
“A longer-term solution is needed to address the rigidity of the current EDD technology infrastructure,” Hilliard told the panel.
This is because the crucial components of the EDD payment system are a quarter century old or more.
“The EDD benefit system, used to administer the state’s unemployment and disability insurance programs, is still based on old and outdated technology,” Hilliard said. “This includes Cobol, which is a 30-year-old program language that is increasingly at risk of performance issues, difficult to maintain and almost impossible to modernize.”
The state agency hopes to find a provider to upgrade its ossified technology sometime in October, with the actual installation taking months to come, according to Hilliard.
Several state lawmakers told Hilliard that they have been inundated by constituents who have lost their jobs and receive no response from the department.
“The EDD continues to fail in California,” said Assemblyman David Chiu, a Democrat who represents part of San Francisco.
EDD officials released a letter from Hilliard that provided an assessment of how far behind the state agency could be in terms of issuing payments to workers.
The agency has identified nearly 6 million “unique claimants” as eligible for payments and processing their claims. About 4.8 million of those have been paid, which means that about 1.2 million unemployed workers are still waiting for payments, despite being authorized to pay.
But hidden in Hilliard’s letter is a disclosure of 889,000 unpaid workers but who “may be eligible with additional information.” Another 239,000 are caught in a “pending EDD resolution” category. This means that between these two categories, another 1.13 million Califonia workers are in a kind of bureaucratic limbo.
Overall, about 7.01 million California workers have filed claims for unemployment benefits for the first time during a period of about four months ending July 25, figures from the United States Department of Labor show.
Several members of the public who testified demanded that Hilliard resign or be expelled.
“EDD’s customer service has been abominable,” said a woman who identified herself as Kelly, a San Diego resident. “You have to do something about this agency.”
In a strange twist during the hearing, several EDD workers took the time during the weekday to call the audience to express their respective opinions, despite unemployed workers saying the agency cannot answer the phone to time, if it does.
And EDD director Hilliard’s testimony was delayed because he was unable to make a call to the meeting room as agreed.
State lawmakers also learned that EDD phone banks receive about 11 million calls a week, but only answer 500,000 to 600,000 a week, or 5 percent.
Chiu noted that the EDD has been struggling with computer problems since at least 2010. Some of the lawmakers and members of the public said Hilliard provided misleading, evasive or vague answers.
“We are living on Groundhog Day,” Chiu said. “We’ve been through this before with the EDD.”
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