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After Hours on Hold, Virginians Must Wait Months for Benefits

Some state residents waited for six hours to speak to someone regarding their unemployment payments, which hadn’t arrived months after filing. Hold time has since decreased, but many still await their payments.

(TNS) — A little more than six hours. That’s the average time unemployed Virginians waited on hold on July 30, 2020, to talk to a customer service representative about their unemployment benefits (or 22,900 seconds to be exact), based on what a vendor provided to the Virginia Employment Commission.

A week earlier, the wait had been nearly five hours (or 17,823 seconds).

The numbers indicate just how challenging it has been for Virginians to get answers and ask questions as they try to get benefits they believe they’re entitled to. And those numbers tell just part of the story.

Some Virginians who applied for benefits with the Virginia Employment Commission have been waiting for months for relief to show up in their bank accounts or even get word on where their claim stands. Ian Armstrong said he lost his job as a golf course superintendent in Newport News and filed for unemployment on Dec. 4. As of early March, he still hadn’t received any benefits. “Mine was a pretty clear-cut case,” he said. He went in on a Monday morning and was told he was being let go, he said. His supervisor assured him he would approve any unemployment claim, Armstrong said. “There was really no doubt I’m eligible for unemployment.”

He started a new job the week of Feb. 8, after moving in with family in Michigan because of mounting bills. All that was done in less time than the Virginia Employment Commission has taken to begin his unemployment benefits, money that’s supposed to tide a person over until they can find another job.

“It took me two weeks of calling every day to get a person on the phone to change my address,” he said. That change must be done on the phone or by physical letter, and not online, according to the VEC’s “unemployment insurance handbook for claimants” on its website.

When Armstrong finally reached a customer service representative on Jan. 6 to change his address, he also asked about the status of his claim and was told the agency was still working on claims from July.

Joyce Fogg, a VEC spokeswoman, said Tuesday that the oldest initial claim that the agency still hadn’t gotten to as of March 3 was from November and that 3,000 initial claims were still in a backlog, down from 168,000 in mid-December. She said the agency expected to catch up with those within 10 days, which could be good news for Armstrong.

She said the agency was also releasing 18,000 payments this week that had been held up to recipients of Pandemic Unemployment Assistance who had filed duplicate claims thinking the first one didn’t work.

The agency has been plagued by turnover, communication issues and technical hurdles, including customer service phone lines being down as recently as this week.

The technological infrastructure behind Virginia’s unemployment system was already outdated when the pandemic struck and initial unemployment claims spiked from 2,706 the week ending March 14 to 147,369 the first week of April. Since then, the number of Virginians seeking some form of weekly unemployment benefit (whether traditional state benefits or COVID-19 related relief) has rarely fallen below 300,000.

In the year since the pandemic took hold, the agency has received 1.5 million claims for unemployment and paid out 1.3 million of them, worth $11.4 billion. Of the remaining 200,000 or so that haven’t been paid, Fogg said 80 percent are claims from workers who weren’t eligible for benefits, either because they were fired, quit or had some other disqualifying reason. She didn’t have an exact number for how many potentially eligible claims hadn’t been paid out yet.

Between April 1 and Sept. 30, Virginia had the worst rate in the United States for making an eligibility determination, doing so within 21 days only 9 percent of the time, according to federal data. The U.S. average in that time was 51.6 percent.

Gov. Ralph Northam dedicated $15 million in the next budget to shoring up VEC’s technology and adding more customer service staff, and in a Dec. 22 announcement “directed the VEC to immediately begin distributing benefit payments” to workers whose claims had been “delayed in the determination process.”

That direction came more than a week after the VEC had already agreed to do so at the urging of the Legal Aid Justice Center, Legal Aid Works, Virginia Poverty Law Center and other advocates. The change, though, primarily benefited people who had begun receiving benefits and then had them cut off as they waited for a review. It didn’t address those who were making first-time claims and had yet to receive any payments.

The percentage of first payments made within 70 days of claims being filed dropped below 90 percent for the first time after June 30, 2020, and was as low as 75 percent by the end of October, according to U.S. Department of Labor data. As of Jan. 31, there were 12,040 claims to go through. Nearly 87 percent were paid in less than 70 days, meaning 13 percent were still waiting.

Until July, the state agency was making fewer than 7,000 determinations a month as to eligibility, according to monthly reports the agency provides to the U.S. Department of Labor’s Employment and Training Administration. In July there were 13,806 determinations, August saw 11,481 and in September there were 10,818. When there are claims that aren’t as clear-cut, however, there are bound to be denials because a person was fired or quit or turned down another job offer.

For those who appeal the denials, hearings have been hard to come by. Early on, the agency was short on hearing examiners, not expecting a sudden swell of claims from a pandemic-induced economic malaise, and the roles require special legal qualifications and training that can take up to six months. As of late June, the agency had just 17 full-time appeals examiners, up from 14 at the start of the pandemic. Fogg said they’ve hired more and continue to do so daily. As of last month, the agency had 20 first-level appeals examiners and another seven were expected to be hired this month.

She attributed part of the delay in payments to training time for VEC staff and vendors and high turnover and retirements. She said VEC staff has been working a minimum of 55 hour weeks without holidays and taking one weekend a month. Last year, they didn’t take any, she said.

State legislators passed initiatives aimed at fixing some elements of the state’s unemployment insurance system. One step would be codifying a regulation that wouldn’t allow the agency to cut off benefits after they’ve been distributed, until a final eligibility determination is made.

Another measure would change state law to allow VEC to contact a claimant by email in addition to physical letter, now the only option.

Del. Sally Hudson, D- Charlottesville, a labor economist and professor at the University of Virginia, also secured legislation that would forgive about $18 million in overpayments made by mistake by VEC to out-of-work Virginians since March 15, 2020, and until June 30, 2022.

She argued that people had applied for benefits in good faith after losing jobs, amid changing rules for new federal relief programs, and when payments arrived in their accounts they had no reason to believe it wasn’t meant for them and spent it. They should not be hit with bills of thousands of dollars to pay back the agency for its mistake, she said.

“They didn’t do anything wrong, they didn’t lie,” she said.

She said there’s still plenty of work to be done to fix the system for workers, not just legislatively but administratively.

For one, she said there needs to be dedicated staff creating and maintaining the agency’s technology rather than relying on a patchwork of outside vendors.

“You cannot outsource your core mission of processing claims and expect to do it well,” she said.

“We desperately need a mindset shift in Richmond,” Hudson said, “that unemployment insurance is a good thing, that the system exists because we never know what form an economic downturn will take.” She said state agencies and, particularly, state senators have expressed more concern with the state’s unemployment insurance trust fund remaining solvent and not impacting businesses with higher taxes.

“You just don’t hear a lot of empathy or investment in Richmond for starting to get payments to people in need,” she said. She called unemployment insurance programs “the best automatic stabilizer we have in a recession,” providing money that can flow to those in need to pay rent and buy groceries without having to wait for stimulus payment relief to come from Washington, D.C.

And as for those those endless hours on hold, those figures were just the wait times reported by one of two contractors the state hired in mid-May to handle more calls as the Virginia Employment Commission was swamped with claims.

Virginia Interactive, which has subcontracted with Hampton-based Faneuil, proposed a contract change order in July worth $4.7 million to add another 200 call center operators to work on the agency’s behalf.

Another vendor, Maximus, had a contract worth an estimated $10.8 million during the first six months and nearly $5 million when it was renewed in October, based on price sheets reviewed by The Pilot through a public records request. Weekly emails Maximus sent to the agency reporting call times and service revealed the waits.

Over time, there have been far fewer calls — from more than 1,000 a day initially to occasionally fewer than 100 — and shorter wait times as a result. The average wait for the 669 callers needing their claim processed by a Maximus worker as recently as Feb. 19, the most recent date available, was about 9 minutes. On Jan. 29, the 143 callers that day had to wait just 7 seconds, on average.

(c)2021 The Virginian-Pilot (Norfolk, Va.) Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

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