A glitch in Vermont’s unemployment insurance application portal was, in fact, not fully fixed last week ahead of a Friday deadline to apply for benefits, as the Department of Labor had claimed last Thursday.
By Tuesday, the department said its technical issues were finally resolved, but Vermonters attempting to apply for benefits were still feeling the impact.
Department of Labor Commissioner Mike Harrington told VTDigger in an interview Tuesday afternoon that an initial technical glitch occurred last Monday in the state’s decades-old unemployment insurance application portal, which then caused “cascading issues” to the system.
When the issues first came to light last Wednesday, Harrington told reporters at a press conference that he estimated that “hundreds” of claimants were impacted by the outage. The following Tuesday, he told VTDigger that, all told, roughly half of Vermont’s unemployed population attempting to apply for benefits last week were impacted by the technical failure in some way. In a given week, the unemployment division may see up to 3,000 applicants, Harrington said Tuesday.
As far as the department is aware as of Tuesday afternoon, the system’s initial glitch and subsequent, cascading issues have been fixed. But the Unemployment Insurance office’s phone lines are still swamped with Vermonters attempting to rectify their cases, causing phone call wait times to extend from two to three hours — a wait time that Harrington acknowledged is “really long and extensive.”
But, he added the caveat that the end of the year is always a busy time for the help line. Typical call wait times this time of year range from an hour and a half to two hours — so the department’s current two-to-three-hour wait is “slightly elevated” in comparison, he said.
“I recognize that it’s an extremely long amount of time. I know these folks are waiting for their benefits, so I’m not trying to say that it’s not an issue,” Harrington said. “We would love our wait times to be much less than that… but we always see extremely long wait times and call volume during our busy season.”
Vermont’s Department of Labor has a well-documented history of technical glitches leading to interruptions in applicants’ abilities to receive timely payouts, including, most infamously, large-scale system outages at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic that led to massive backlogs and benefit delays.
This latest episode dates back to last week, when Vermonters attempted to apply for their unemployment insurance benefits for the week of Dec. 3 through Dec. 9 by a Friday, Dec. 15 deadline. Due to a technical failure in the application portal, hundreds of Vermonters were unable to submit their claims, despite qualifying. When they turned to the state Department of Labor’s phone lines for help, they were met with hourslong wait times, Harrington told reporters last Wednesday.
By Thursday, the department announced that the technical error was rectified. Vermonters could proceed with their applications and that the department would not extend the Dec. 15 deadline, a press statement said.
But the “cascading” problems with the application portal had not all been fixed.
On Monday — after the Friday deadline lapsed — the department issued yet another statement, saying, “a population of unemployment insurance claimants may be experiencing issues accessing the Unemployment Insurance Claimant Portal to file for benefits for a given week and getting through to the Unemployment Claimant Assistance Center.”
By the time the department’s most recent statement was issued, it was a new week. The state’s unemployment system requires weekly applications, so the series of glitches now impact Vermonters attempting to collect unemployment benefits for two separate weeks: the week of Dec. 3 through 9, and the week of Dec. 10 through 16. The deadline to apply for the latter week is this coming Friday, Dec. 22.
Harrington told VTDigger that, for any claimants who were unable to file for benefits by the Friday deadline this week or last week, the state will backdate their application. “We will make sure that every claimant is made whole,” Harrington pledged.
“In this case, it was purely on the state and the system,” Harrington said. “We will backdate the claim as far as we need to in order to make the claimant whole, so claimants shouldn’t worry about not receiving benefits if they were already determined eligible and were receiving benefits up until last week… We will get them caught up.”
But Vermonters’ benefits may be delayed in arriving — a hardship for claimants who “rely on that timeliness of benefits,” Harrington said.
The outage came at the end of the year and amid the holiday season, a time of year that can be particularly financially stressful. Harrington said he empathizes.
“We completely recognize that this creates a very challenging situation for folks heading into the holiday season, but also want them to know that we are doing everything we can to make sure we get benefits out to everybody who needs them,” Harrington said.
As for the source of the ordeal, Harrington pointed his finger to the state’s decades-old unemployment IT system. It’s a problem that he and state leaders like Gov. Phil Scott have bemoaned for years. State lawmakers have dedicated $30 million to overhauling the system, but the fruits of that labor are still years away, Harrington said Tuesday.
He said he hopes the department will secure a vendor to conduct the IT overhaul in the first quarter of 2024. From there, he said the reprogramming could take, optimistically, about two years to complete.
“If all goes according to plan, best case scenario is two years,” Harrington said. “But I rarely see technology projects occur in the desired time frame.”
