New Jersey taxpayers spent tens of millions of dollars for help answering phone calls from unemployment claimants during the pandemic.
Now, unemployment rates have returned to pre-pandemic levels, but thousands of applicants are still experiencing the same benefits processing delays that were commonplace in 2020 and 2021.
And some applicants are expressing a familiar frustration: the inability to reach a human being on the phone at the Department of Labor.
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“I called monthly and then down to weekly, just to try and get somebody. I’d call as early as 9am in the morning and I’d be told ‘we’ve hit our status of how many people are in the que. Hang up and call tomorrow,” said Sydney Ziemba, a claimant who field for Unemployment Insurance back in January of 2021.
In the Spring of 2020, hundreds of thousands of New Jerseyans applied for unemployment Insurance benefits each week. The crush of applications led the state’s Department of Labor and Workforce Development (DOLWD) to contract with call-center company Navient, paying the firm up to $3 million dollars each month to field calls from applicants stuck in red tape.
But now that the call center contract with Navient is over, state legislators are reporting lots of constituents still can’t seem to get a human being on the phone to hash out problems they encounter with the online unemployment filing portal.
“If you make one mistake you are immediately put into unemployment hell and there is no getting out,” said Sen. Anthony Bucco (R–Denville). “Because if you make the phone call, most of the time you are getting a recording and you’re not able to talk to anybody in order to get you out of it.”
According to invoices obtained by the I-Team, the total bill for the Navient call center was $53 million to answer 5.7 million calls. That amounts to more than $9 per call.
“It was a complete waste of money,” Bucco said of the private call center. “We shouldn’t have put it out to a third party because all that third party did was collect information and then send it to the Department of Labor!”
A spokesperson for Navient declined to comment on the company’s call center services.
New Jersey Labor Commissioner Rob Asaro-Angelo declined the I-Team’s request for an interview, but in an emailed statement his spokesperson, Angela Delli-Santi, said the call center was instrumental in handling “an unprecedented volume of calls.” Now that the call center contract is over, she said the department has increased the number state employees assigned to answer unemployment calls from roughly 80 agents pre-COVID to an average of 104 now.
“As the commissioner noted at the time of the transition from the contracted call center, we expected a bump up in wait times because fewer people would be answering phones BUT once people got through they could expect their issue to be resolved immediately or shortly thereafter, rather than having to be put on an escalation list and waiting several weeks for a callback,” Delli-Santi said.
Despite that optimistic outlook, last year the Labor Department provided data to state lawmakers painting a deteriorating picture of the benefits process. The federal government says most unemployment beneficiaries should get their first payments no more than 2-3 weeks after filing a claim. Prior to the pandemic, in 2019, New Jersey met that benchmark 87 percent of the time. But in 2022, New Jersey got checks out on time only 50 percent of the time.
The numbers are even worse when it comes to non-monetary decisions. According to the federal government, states should make most nonmonetary unemployment determinations in three weeks or less. In 2019, New Jersey met that benchmark 83 percent of the time; last year, the goal was met just 27 percent of the time.
In testimony before the Labor Committee, Asaro-Angelo blamed onerous federal regulations and an explosion of fraud for slowing down benefits processing nationwide.
“The identity theft that has happened since COVID is unbelievable and through the roof across the country,” Asaro-Angelo said.
Last September, the US Department of Labor Office of Inspector General reported the identification of $45.6 billion in potentially fraudulent unemployment payouts since March of 2020.
After demands from lawmakers, last year DOLWD began offering unemployment claimants the chance to schedule in-person appointments at a dozen “One-Stop Career Centers.” The department says about 68,000 claimants have so far scheduled one of those in-person appointments. As of this article’s publishing, wait times for in-person appointments ranged from 3 to 5 weeks.
But Bucco said even more in-person services are needed. In fact he said face-to-face claims processing is also critical to cut down on fraud.
“It’s easy to commit fraud over a computer,” he said. It’s very difficult to do that when you have to walk into an in-person call center and give them the information and they can look at your drivers license and take the documentation that they need.”
Ziemba said filing her application face-to-face in an office, would have eliminated the clerical errors she believes brought her claim to a halt. After her initial online claim in January 2021, she says she was issued a denial of benefits letter citing incorrect dates of employment. She appealed that denial, and has been awaiting a hearing ever since.
According to the Department of Labor there was a backlog of more than 4,300 people awaiting appeals decisions at the beginning of 2023.
Ziemba said it is particularly frustrating to her that fraudsters have had so much success getting access to ill-gotten benefits, while her unemployment appeal has been languishing.
“That’s just so frustrating that people can easily slip through the system and get that money,” Ziemba said. “I’ve been sitting here for years waiting for it.”
