NJ taxpayers spent tens of millions for help answering phone calls from unemployment claimants during the pandemic. And some applicants are expressing a familiar frustration: the inability to reach a human being on the phone at the Dept. of Labor.
“I called monthly and then down to weekly, just to try and get somebody. I’d call as early as 9am in the morning and I’d be told ‘we’ve hit our status of how many people are in the que. Hang up and call tomorrow,” said Sydney Ziemba, a claimant who field for Unemployment Insurance back in January of 2021.
“If you make one mistake you are immediately put into unemployment hell and there is no getting out,” said Sen. Anthony Bucco . “Because if you make the phone call, most of the time you are getting a recording and you’re not able to talk to anybody in order to get you out of it.” New Jersey Labor Commissioner Rob Asaro-Angelo declined the I-Team’s request for an interview, but in an emailed statement his spokesperson, Angela Delli-Santi, said the call center was instrumental in handling “an unprecedented volume of calls.” Now that the call center contract is over, she said the department has increased the number state employees assigned to answer unemployment calls from roughly 80 agents pre-COVID to an average of 104 now.
The numbers are even worse when it comes to non-monetary decisions. According to the federal government, states should make most nonmonetary unemployment determinations in three weeks or less. In 2019, New Jersey met that benchmark 83 percent of the time; last year, the goal was met just 27 percent of the time.
Last September, the US Department of Labor Office of Inspector General reported the identification of $45.6 billion in potentially fraudulent unemployment payouts since March of 2020. “It’s easy to commit fraud over a computer,” he said. It’s very difficult to do that when you have to walk into an in-person call center and give them the information and they can look at your drivers license and take the documentation that they need.”
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