Florida long knew its jobless assistance website was a train wreck. It blew off warnings
When the Labor Department releases its weekly data on Thursday for first-time claims for unemployment insurance benefits, the actual number for Floridians reported as already out of work and seeking benefits will be artificially lower than reality, potentially far lower, because of an unfolding disaster at a vital Florida agency.
The federal numbers released every Thursday are reported to the Labor Department by the states, and in Florida people simply can’t get through to the Florida Department of Economic Opportunity’s Reemployment Assistance Program office.
“It’s impossible to do on the website. It’s been completely impossible,” said Jesse Harris, 33, a chef let go from a West Kendall restaurant two weeks ago and unable to change a PIN number on the Reemployment Assistance Program website since then.
Without the new PIN number, Harris can’t apply for unemployment benefits. He’s tried at midnight, he’s tried at midday and in the morning. He can’t get through by phone, cannot get on a callback list.
“It has completely locked people out,” Harris said, exasperated. “It almost feels like they don’t want to pay this money to anyone because they know they can’t.”
Dina Fisher has also been trying for a week to successfully change her PIN number to apply for unemployment benefits after being laid off in mid-March by a South Florida retailer. She already has an account with the department because her employer routinely lays off part of its work force for three months over the summer, but unable to log on to reset her PIN, she is trapped like thousands of other Floridians. For the past week she’s been unable to reset the PIN or get someone to answer the toll-free number that she’s directed by the website to call.
“I am unable to log in to the unemployment website because everybody is trying to do it. And when I am finally able to get some sort of notification they tell me I can’t continue, they tell I have to call this number but I can’t go further,” Fisher said.
Simone Smith, not her real surname, has also been unable to access the website. She is one of the people in the so-called gig economy that the Trump administration and Congress sought to help in the massive $2 trillion stimulus package passed last Friday. Simone drives for Uber on weekends, and the South Beach resident is precisely the kind of gig-economy worker targeted by the stimulus plan.
She wasn’t counting on a crippled state website that’s blocking her ability to get money, especially after having received a letter from her property manager encouraging her and others to file for unemployment in order to pay rent. The letter made no offer of rent forgiveness and noted the owner also had bills to pay.
“The rent is due, so I really depend on the unemployment benefits,” said Simone, who didn’t want her surname used, concerned about her financial predicament. “I stopped driving when this whole thing started two weeks ago. There’s nobody to drive anyway, its pointless. … You barely see anybody on the streets.”
The problems with the assistance program’s website are not a surprise. There were plenty of warnings about the underlying infrastructure of the state agency’s website, highlighted in a March 2019 report by the Florida Auditor General’s Office. The blunt operational audit, first reported by the Tampa Bay Times, noted that the agency had dallied in making improvements on issues first flagged in 2015.
The March 2019 report made 17 specific recommendations, many of them repeats of prior items, on how to fix the online Reemployment Assistance Claims and Benefits Information System, known as CONNECT. And the agency’s response last March was the equivalent of “yeah, whatever,” couched in the language of bureaucracy.
“The Department will continue to develop improved procedures for the document intake and indexing processes,” Ken Lawson, the department’s executive director, wrote in a response to one of the audit’s recommendations.
All 17 responses began with generic “the Department will continue to” language, and Lawson directed follow-up to the agency’s inspector general, Jim Langsfeld. It’s unclear what has happened since. Langsfeld did not answer telephone and email requests for comment.
“I’ve been asking for executive action and more resources for weeks. Others have been doing the same,” said Florida state Sen. José Javier Rodríguez, D-Miami. “The application process was basically down, in the experience of 100 percent of my constituents. That’s gone from everyone to the vast majority.”
Rodríguez said he’d spoken with Lawson and was told the agency has hired an outside call center with 250 employees that will be working the phones to help field questions, and that the agency is making IT upgrades to work out the problems.
“Given that the system has been down … what data are they going to report” to the Labor Department, the senator asked, noting “only a small subset” of those seeking assistance have been able to get through.
A number of state lawmakers led by Rodríguez are sending a letter to Lawson, asking that benefit payments be made retroactive to capture the large number of Floridians unable to file for unemployment benefits.
“Every day that someone cannot complete an appeal is a day they are losing benefits,” he said.
Lawson’s department did take action on Tuesday to issue an emergency order waiving the state’s one-week waiting period before individuals can file unemployment claims, and it made the action retroactive to claims filed during the week beginning on March 29.
With so many Floridians rushing to seek jobless benefits, it is likely that there will be an increase in appeals. The first-level appeal of a claims rejection is handled in a telephone hearing with an appeals judge, and from there an appeal can be made to the three-member Reemployment Assistance Appeals Commission. It disposed of 2,370 appeals in 2019, but the caseload is likely to rise given the current spike in joblessness. The commission did not respond to request for comment about preparatory steps to avoid the problems unfolding in the Reemployment Assistance Program.
What is clear is that the official number of people filing first-time jobless claims in Florida is not a reflection of reality.
“They are absolutely missing people,” said Heidi Shierholz, chief economist for the U.S. Labor Department from 2014 to 2017 and now a researcher at the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute. “This is an unforced error in some sense. We have dramatically underfunded these programs for decades.”
But the unemployment claims number last week, although almost certainly an undercount, was grisly: The 74,000 new claims represented a jump of more than 67,000 from the week prior.
And the crush of joblessness in Florida, where more than nine million worked for non-farm employers as of February — the majority in the services sector — is sure to get worse in the weeks ahead.
“It’s going to mean people do not get resources in a timely way,” Shierholz said. “The pace of this is like nothing we’ve seen before. The labor market has been completely upended in about three weeks.”
Miami Herald staff writer Alex Harris in Miami contributed to this report.
This story was originally published April 1, 2020 at 6:47 PM.
