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Lawmakers Question EDD Officials on Claims, Tech Issues

The director of the Employment Development Department told members of a California State Assembly budget subcommittee that a “longer-term solution” is needed to address issues with the agency’s tech infrastructure.

California lawmakers grilled state labor officials on Thursday amid rising concerns about the government’s inability to pay unemployment claims that have soared amid widespread business shutdowns — and learned that decades-old technologies underpin the creaky payments system.

During a state legislative hearing on Thursday, the Employment Development Department was portrayed as inept and unresponsive to the needs of jobless workers who have lost work in record numbers because state and local government agencies have ordered businesses to shut down to help control the coronavirus.

State EDD Director Sharon Hilliard told a state Assembly budget subcommittee hearing Thursday that even the massive hiring efforts at the EDD that Gov. Gavin Newsom and the state Labor Department have trumpeted won’t address a core problem at the agency: technology.

“A longer-term solution is needed to address the rigidity of the EDD’s current technology infrastructure,” Hilliard told the panel.

That’s because crucial components of the EDD payment system are a quarter-century old or more.

“The EDD’s benefits system, used to administer the unemployment and state disability insurance programs, still relies on old and obsolete technology,” Hilliard said. “This includes COBOL, which is a 30-year-old program language that is increasingly at risk of having performance issues, difficult to maintain, and almost impossible to modernize.”

The state agency hopes to find a vendor to upgrade its ossified technology by sometime in October, with the actual installation to take months more, according to Hilliard.

Several state lawmakers told Hilliard that they have been inundated by constituents who have lost their jobs and aren’t getting any sort of an answer from the department.

“The EDD continues to fail California,” said Assemblymember David Chiu, a Democrat who represents part of San Francisco.

EDD officials released a letter from Hilliard that provided an assessment about how far behind the state agency might be in terms of issuing payments to workers.

About 6 million “unique claimants” have been identified by the agency as being eligible for payments and having their claims processed. About 4.8 million of those have been paid — which means about 1.2 million jobless workers are still awaiting payments even though they have been cleared to be paid.

But tucked away in the Hilliard letter is a disclosure of 889,000 workers who haven’t been paid but who “may be eligible with additional information.”

Another 239,000 are stuck in a category “pending EDD resolution.” This means that between these two categories, another 1.13 million Califonia workers are in a kind of bureaucratic limbo.

All told, about 7.01 million California workers have filed first-time claims for unemployment benefits during a roughly four-month period that ended on July 25, U.S. Labor Department figures show.

Several members of the public who testified demanded that Hilliard quit her post or be ousted.

“The EDD customer service has been abominable,” said a woman who identified herself as Kelly, a San Diego resident. “Something has to be done about this agency.”

In a strange twist during the hearing, several EDD workers took the time during the weekday to call into the hearing to voice their respective opinions — even though jobless workers say the agency is unable to answer the telephone in a timely fashion, if at all.

And the testimony of EDD Director Hilliard was delayed — because she was unable to place a call into the meeting room as arranged.

The state lawmakers also learned that the EDD phone banks receive about 11 million calls a week, but is only answering 500,000 to 600,000 of those a week, or 5 percent.

Chiu noted that the EDD has been wrestling with computer problems since at least 2010. Some of the lawmakers and members of the public said Hilliard provided misleading, evasive, or vague answers.

“We are experiencing Groundhog Day,” Chiu said. “We have been through this before with the EDD.”

(c)2020 the San Jose Mercury News. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.