6 months into the pandemic, some laid-off workers find themselves waiting weeks or even months to receive their unemployment benefits.
“It’s taking them seven weeks on average, instead of three weeks, and those are just among the decided cases,” said Andrew Stettner, a senior fellow at the Century Foundation. “We have to hold states' feet to the fire to make sure they fulfill those rights.”
“We get emails from people who have had their cars repossessed or had to move in with parents,” Paxton said. “They talk about being forced out of their homes, having to relocate, having their bank accounts frozen for weeks… I don’t know how so many people are getting by. What we hear from them are really dire circumstances,” she said.
“A lot of the incentive these programs are built on is making sure that nobody gets benefits that shouldn’t qualify. There is a real priority not on getting benefits out quickly but on getting it out accurately,” Goger said.In ordinary times, this can create headaches for filers, but in a pandemic, Goger said those administrative tasks piled up fast. “That’s a big bottleneck.”
“It’s a very decentralized system and every state has its own separate system,” Goger said, which means each individual state has to essentially reinvent the wheel when they invest in technological upgrades. “You can’t get any economies of scale in modernizing those systems across more than one state very easily,” she said.
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