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A much-vaunted new unemployment insurance portal for the self-employed is still blocking some claimants, causing a wave of frustration and anger for people who haven’t been able to earn money since the Covid-19 crisis began in Vermont.
“I have been out of work since March 11 with no income,” said Michelle Pekrol, a Pownal resident who works as a production assistant. “What do I tell the mortgage company, the power company?”
The Vermont Department of Labor has been overwhelmed by claimants since Gov. Phil Scott closed nonessential businesses and issued his “stay home, stay safe” order in March. More than 80,000 people swamped the DOL’s unemployment insurance system, which has been unable to process all of the claims.
Among them are the self-employed and sole proprietors, who are able to apply for unemployment insurance for the first time through a federal program called Pandemic Unemployment Assistance, or PUA.
Initially, the DOL advised the self-employed to apply through its traditional system. But those claims weren’t processed as promised, due to a number of complicating factors, including an outdated computer system, government regulations that conflicted with the new PUA, and a shortage of phone staff in a system that had been set up to handle 500 claims per week. Because so many of the online claims required follow-up calls, the department brought on retired employees, trained many more from other agencies, and strengthened its ties to an independent contractor, resulting in 150 additional phone staff. The state’s unemployment rate — which was about 2.4% when the pandemic closed jobs in March — is fluctuating at 20% to 23%, interim DOL Commissioner Mike Harrington said Friday.
The DOL for weeks promised it would roll out a new system just for PUA claimants, and on Wednesday night, that system went live. While many people were able to successfully file claims, many weren’t, and their frustration is growing.
“Why am I being denied benefits, when they’ve been saying right along “self-employed / independent contractors ARE ELIGIBLE?!” wrote Walt Mather, a 73-year-old self-employed Vietnam veteran in Bradford who supports a family of six.
“I’ve worked all my life and was still working and sole support for this family right up until this CoVid-19 hit,” Mather wrote. “Now maybe I filled out the forms wrong but there was no help available.”
The DOL didn’t yet have a lot of answers Friday for the self-employed.
As of 10 a.m. on Friday, about 5,800 PUA applications had been submitted, said Harrington at Gov. Phil Scott’s three-times-a-week Covid-19 press conference. Claimants can file retroactively back to the week of March 15, when the governor started to close businesses through executive orders.
Asked about reports that PUA claimants couldn’t get through on the phone, Harrington said the DOL planned to add another 25 people to its call center Friday afternoon, to bring the total number of people working only on PUA calls to 80 by Monday.
“We knew there would be an influx as soon as this program went live,” Harrington said. “We’ll continue to track data and call volumes over both yesterday and today. The call center is open on Saturday, and if we need to make additional adjustments in more staff, shedding calls to a different group of people, we’ll be making those adjustments as soon as that information is available.”
In an email Thursday night, DOL spokesperson Kyle Thweatt said the department was aware that there were reports of issues. “Some individuals have tried to log into PUA without going through the general unemployment application first. Some issues are related to information being entered incorrectly by a claimant, and the claimant wanting to change their answers.
“There are also some technical issues that are being fixed as we speak,” Thweatt said. “Errors related to SSN number not being found, even for individuals who have completed the appropriate steps, but still can’t access the PUA system. The Department will announce when that issue has been resolved.”
He added that the DOL is also working to improve the instructions on the application.
Because the self-employed have never filed for unemployment insurance before, it’s not clear how many are trying to. Harrington a week ago estimated 30,000 to 40,000 would apply. In the application, they must use their 2019 tax returns to show their income. Once they successfully file a Vermont claim, they also receive a weekly $600 payment authorized in the CARES Act passed by Congress in late March.
Cameron Wood, the head of the state’s unemployment insurance system, promised Tuesday that the new system for the self-employed would be user-friendly, with “extreme self-service functionality.”
But that has not been the experience for some, like Pekrol in Pownal.
“Many of us self-employed signed up on the original portal as we were told. We have not received an email telling us to finish our claim” as promised by the DOL, said Pekrol. “You go to the site and click ‘I did not get an email’, you fill out your name, DOB and SS and it says no record of you, please file a new claim,” Pekrol wrote in an email.
“You go to file a new claim and it says there is already a claim under your social security number. You cannot reach anyone via email, FB messenger or phone. The phone just says, hey we’re busy and disconnects you.”
Harrington on Friday said PUA claimants would have better luck online.
“Unless someone doesn’t have internet or doesn’t have a computer, people are encouraged to go online to our website to complete the forms electronically under their own power, and if they have questions they can call the hotline,” he said. “I do know there are some people who haven’t been able to get through on the hotline. That’s something we hope to rectify by bringing on these additional agents this afternoon.”
Editor’s note: This story was updated at 1:38 p.m. to include Department of Labor Commissioner Michael Harrington’s comments about the PUA system at the Friday press conference.
