The Oregon Employment Division said this week that 49,000 claims for jobless benefits are stuck in an adjudication backlog that is sometimes months long. This was the first time the OED went on record with a specific estimate.
The legally mandated adjudication of claims is complicated by many aspects, most but not all resulting from businesses unexpectedly closing or furloughing large numbers of people due to the coronavirus pandemic. Hundreds of thousands of Oregonians waited weeks or months for benefits. Tens of thousands still wait.
David Gerstenfeld, OED interim director, told a Senate committee Tuesday that the agency has resolved most claims made under the state’s standard unemployment plan. Other plans, set up quickly when the lockdown began in March, have not been paid off as promptly. Around 2,000 claims by self-employed people against Congress’s Pandemic Unemployment Assistance program wait in limbo.
416,000 people have been paid $4.4 billion since March, mostly from a $600-a-week bonus program set up by Congress which has since expired. Also in March, the largest block of cases – the current exact number is unknown – were referred for adjudication. Gerstenfeld said that due to the pandemic, the number of adjudicators on staff has been increased from 80 to 330, and the agency shortened the training process to bring new adjudicators on faster.
Since July, Oregon has offered to advance money to qualified people before adjudication, calling it “benefits while you wait.” The number of people who would benefit from this is not yet known.
To try to address the economic crisis produced by the partial shutdown of the economy, Congress authorized states to waive the usual one-week delay and begin paying benefits immediately. According to Gerstenfeld, every other state began paying “waiting week” benefits, but Oregon’s system could not handle the change in policy. Some people who became unemployed in March are still waiting for their so-called waiting week check. On the other hand, a special $300 a week “bonus” authorized by presidential executive order will be delivered to those who have certified that they are eligible.
At the root of the problem lies a 1990s computer system that functioned poorly in the relatively stable times of 2019 – sometimes producing backlogs of as much as 16 weeks, according to Gerstenfeld – and has been deemed completely inadequate in 2020. Oregon, seen as one the least prepared states for the wave of pandemic unemployment, has known its system is problematic for at least a decade.
John M. Burt
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