By Katy Murphy 09/20/2020 01:04 AM EDT
California’s embattled unemployment agency will not accept new unemployment claims for the next two weeks, accepting a recommendation from a governor-appointed Strike Team dispatched less than two months ago, its director announced late Saturday night.
The Newsom administration Saturday released a report with recommendations on improving California’s unemployment agency, from adopting a commercially available identity verification tool to taking a two- week “reset” period before accepting applications from first-time applicants.
Meanwhile, Employment Development Department head Sharon Hilliard wrote that it will take until the end of January to get through the current backlog. She said the agency “is proactively looking at ways to reduce that timeline. Alternatively, if no changes were made, the EDD would still be working through the current backlog well into July 2021.”
Key findings: The report underscores just how outdated the agency’s systems and processes are; one recommendation is to allow people to upload documents from their computers or phones when further documentation or clarification is required, rather than by regular mail.
Other findings and recommendations include:
Too many fraud checks: About four out of 10 claims are flagged for the much slower manual approval “when they were simple matters involving the length of a name or addition of a middle initial, for example.” The strike team helped EDD acquire the ID.me identification tool which it says will help verify identities and reduce fraud more efficiently, drastically reducing the backlog’s growth beginning Oct. 5.
Inefficient use of staff: The agency rapidly ramped up its staffing to meet the demand. But the new employees “are taking up almost all of the bandwidth of the experienced employees,” the only people on staff with the knowledge to process more complex claims. The strike team recommended those department veterans focus exclusively on claims processing and that new staff be directed to process outgoing mail and to make phone calls to people “suspended in the process.”
Transparency needed: The department should improve its transparency by publishing a weekly dashboard showing the number of backlogged claims and an estimated time to process them and make its communications and instructions easier to understand.
Reset: The department should wait for two weeks to accept new applications as part of a recommended “reset.” Once the ID.me identity verification system is up and running, new claimants will have a better chance of having their claims automatically approved.
Context: Gov. Gavin Newsom in late July announced he had created a strike team led by Government Operations Agency Secretary Yolanda Richardson and Code for America founder Jennifer Pahlka. Their task was to “reimagine” the department’s aging IT systems and “transform the unemployment insurance customer experience for the digital age.”
The team also included about a dozen representatives from the California Government Operations Agency, the California Department of Technology and the California Office of Digital Innovation.
According to a release from Government Operations Agency, the strike team “observed teams at work at EDD offices in Sacramento and Rancho Cordova, extracted and analyzed data from EDD’s many IT systems, reviewed training materials and claimant communications, studied call center data, and interviewed hundreds of people for their feedback and suggestions including legislative members and staff.”
What’s next: Hilliard wrote in her response that she agreed with the four biggest recommendations, including the “reset.”
“New claimants should not see a delay in benefit payments,” she wrote, “and in fact many of them will actually get their payments faster as they avoid the older time-intensive ID Verification process.”
