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Unemployment payments weeks late in nearly every state

Stateline.org

Like millions of Americans, Kathleen Kroeger lost her job in the pandemic and needed help. Five months later, alongside scores of other Americans, she’s still looking for it.

States are swamped with unemployment claims, delaying the resolution of even minor paperwork issues. In some cases, it has taken legal action to break the logjam. It’s a problem states are wrestling with in different ways, ranging from adding phone staff to hiring contractors, and a challenge President-elect Joe Biden’s transition team has made a priority.

“Just the basic unemployment, $345 a week, would have made a big difference,” said Kroeger, 40, who managed a restaurant near her home in Piedmont, S.D., until it closed its doors in March because of the pandemic. She left soon afterwards to battle her own Covid-19 case and other health problems.

She also missed out on the $600 weekly enhanced benefits – offered by the CARES Act until July – because the state never approved her for benefits.

Kroeger has checked daily and made dozens of fruitless calls to South Dakota’s Department of Labor & Regulation.

“I must have talked to 35 people. It’s always the same story – ‘It’s on somebody’s desk, they’re going through them all, they’ll let you know,’” said Kroeger, who depleted her savings and borrowed money from her family before finding another job in August. She applied for benefits in early May.

Backlogs have become the norm in almost every state, according to federal timeliness reports reviewed by Stateline. As of Nov. 1, only three states, North Dakota, Rhode Island and Wyoming, met the federal standard of getting benefit payments out within three weeks for 87% of applicants.

The 87% standard, set in 2005 by the U.S Department of Labor, carries no penalties but requires states to have a plan to correct the problem.

South Dakota had the lowest timeliness rate, with only 18.8% of payments going out within three weeks, with Kentucky (27.1%) and Maryland (27.9%) next. The rate was less than half for 14 states, including New York and California.

Before the pandemic, almost every state was at or above 87%. North Carolina had the lowest rate, 79.6%. Forty-four states and the District of Columbia paid 90% or more of claims within three weeks; now none does.

States have a legal duty to pay benefits on time, said Andrew Stettner, a senior fellow at the progressive Century Foundation. Some advocates have gone to court to force payments and press for change.

“The inability of states to climb out of the hole of untimely payment is an example of the system failures exposed by Covid-19,” Stettner said. “The federal government ought to be pressing them to understand their backlog and bottlenecks and coming up with solutions.”

States were first slammed with benefit applications in March, when claims jumped from 282,000 to almost 6.9 million, and new claims continue to pour in at an unprecedented rate of more than 700,000 a week. Massive delays and a chorus of complaints led to shakeups in state labor departments.

Yet even as modernization increases efficiency for routine cases, the number of left behind and unresolved cases continues to grow, and late payments are increasing in most states.

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