Nearly seven months into the Covid-19 crisis, things are still rocky at the state Department of Labor, which in March started handling millions of dollars in emergency relief money authorized by Congress.
For months, as the state labor department struggled to increase its capabilities, newly unemployed Vermonters complained about jammed phone lines and balky application systems. The department hired contractors to help as it went from processing about 6,000 applications a week at its peak to about 90,000 in April and May.
Vermonters are still complaining about the application process and about poor service from the call centers hastily set up to handle thousands of new calls. Meanwhile, some are also saying they’ve been informed they owe the state labor department thousands of dollars in money that was overpaid.
Others say the checks they’ve recently received from the DOL are bouncing.
Meanwhile, many of the unemployed Vermonters who received $600 weekly checks as a supplement to their unemployment insurance are disappointed to find they’re not included in the newest phase of the relief program, which pays $300 a week in federal funds.
“I received the emails, I’ve answered all of the questions, continue to file weekly and still have not received any checks yet,” said one person who wrote in response to a Sept. 29 DOL Facebook post about Lost Wage Assistance payments. “Neither has my mother. Why does VT seem so far behind the other states on this?”
Confusion about who qualified
The new $300 program, authorized in August, has stricter criteria than the $600 program did. To get a check, claimants need to certify that they lost their employment as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic, and they must have been previously working enough hours to receive at least a $100 state unemployment benefit payment.
It’s not yet clear how many Vermonters who received the $600 checks for months — authorized by Congress in March — will be eligible for the new round of payments.
The first round of $300 checks, which came to $21.6 million, was authorized by the Federal Emergency Management Agency and went out to 25,675 claimants in mid-September. The state labor department is now working on the second round of FEMA checks as part of the new Lost Wage Assistance program.
Nearly 200 comments greeted the labor department’s announcement of the payments on Facebook.
“They make everything so confusing!” said one claimant. “So now there’s only 3 weeks of money for everyone, not 6??”
“I would much rather be working than going through this! But I don’t have a position to go back to now!”
Cameron Wood, head of the labor department’s unemployment insurance division, said the agency only recently received approval for the additional three weeks of benefits. The department is now sending checks to people who were unemployed from Aug. 1 through the week ending Sept. 5.
“We’re working to get payments out the door,” he said Oct. 1.
There is also widespread confusion about the state’s $100 payments to the unemployed, which were approved as part of the state budget that Gov. Phil Scott signed Friday. That $17 million fund is expected to last for about five weeks, based on 35,000 to 40,000 people being eligible, said Sen. Michael Sirotkin, D-Chittenden, chairperson of the Senate Committee on Economic Development, Housing and General Affairs.
While that money will also be paid through the labor department, it’s not closely connected to the $300 payment, Sirotkin said.
“People could get it on different weeks than they get the $300,” he said.
The federal supplements stem from a decision that Congress made in March to send money to people via the states’ unemployment insurance systems.
Congress included a $600-a-week payment to any person receiving unemployment insurance. That expired at the end of July. With thousands of people still out of work, lawmakers and others created the $300-a-week program as a temporary fix, and the president in August authorized the use of FEMA money to provide an additional supplement to unemployment insurance. The hardest-hit sector in Vermont is restaurants and hospitality, where the labor department reported 50% unemployment in July.
When the supplement expired at the end of July, about 50,000 Vermonters were receiving the weekly $600 in addition to regular unemployment benefits, Wood said. He said it’s difficult to know how many people will be eligible for $300 checks because it’s not yet clear how many will attest that they lost their work as a result of Covid-19.
“We’ve seen some individuals attest for some weeks, but not all. Some have not attested at all. So some may be receiving one $300 check, and some $900,” Wood said.
Among this number are people who qualified for Pandemic Unemployment Assistance, or PUA, a program that expanded unemployment insurance eligibility to people who historically have never filed for it, including freelancers, independent contractors and others.
All of Vermont’s 10,000 or so PUA recipients should have received a payment by now, Wood said Oct. 1. That’s because to be eligible for PUA at all, they have already attested they lost their employment as a result of Covid-19.
“If you’re in the PUA program on a weekly basis, you’re attesting you meet one of the Covid-qualifying reasons,” he said.
Return to sender
As the number of unemployment claims has risen, so has the number of overpayments or underpayments found in the system.
It’s impossible to know how many people have gotten emails asking them to pay money back because the Department of Labor’s new database can’t provide that kind of data, said Dirk Anderson, the agency’s general counsel. He and Wood also said they had no information on the rate of overpayments and underpayments before the pandemic, and no way of obtaining it.
“It was built to push out PUA as rapidly as possible, and as a result there are a lot of shortcomings with it you wouldn’t expect in a regular unemployment benefit database,” Anderson said. “I’m told that we can’t run the kind of report on PUA that we could for regular UI; we can’t query the system to say how many PUA recipients are in overpayment.”
Wood said overpayment often happens as a result of identity theft or from people filing for unemployment in more than one state. He added that the new PUA program doesn’t have the traditional checks and balances that the regular unemployment insurance program does.
“Therefore, I would imagine the improper payments are going to be higher than they were pre-Covid, just because of volume,” he said. “I can be honest: it’s not our priority right now, because we’re still trying to get payments out the door to Vermonters who desperately need the money.”
Bounced checks
Meanwhile, still other unemployment insurance recipients say their checks from the labor department are bouncing when they try to cash them.
Kyle Thweatt, a spokesperson for the department, said he doesn’t want claimants to think the checks didn’t go through because of insufficient funds. What happened was that the labor department sent out checks for more money than claimants for the $300 program were owed, Thweatt said.
“Rather than creating overpayments for these claimants, the department determined the most efficient approach to rectifying the situation was to void and reissue the correct payment to claimants,” he said. “There were approximately 275 claimants impacted by this specific issue and all were notified as soon as we were able to identify the issue and impacted population.”
