After several hours the Oregon Employment Department said it has resolved the issue with its systems, which incorrectly told laid-off workers they had to restart their benefits claims. The department blamed a “record level of online claim processing, paired with other weekend system maintenance” for the problems.
“As of just a few minutes ago, we’ve already seen at least 20,000 who received the re-start error this morning now successfully file their weekly claim,” communications manager Gail Krumenauer wrote in a 1 p.m. email. “The fix is working.”
The state’s erroneous restart instructions alarmed and confused recently laid-off workers for the second Sunday in a row and come amid a litany of problems plaguing the state’s jobless claims systems amid the coronavirus outbreak.
Many wrote about their Sunday frustrations on Twitter.
Laid-off workers must file each week they are out of a job to continue receiving benefits. For two Sundays in a row, though, the system has rejected many of those weekly filings and incorrectly told claimants to start all over.
After the breakdown in the claims system last week, the employment department promised the “re-start error” wouldn’t happen again at the start of this week.
“We have an IT fix in place that should prevent the re-start error from happening again, or happening to a new set of claimants, next week,” the department told The Oregonian/OregonLive last Monday.
On Sunday, the department acknowledged the error happened again after all. But by early afternoon it said the issue has been fixed and urged benefits recipients to try again.
“If you experienced the re-start claim error, you should be able to try again and successfully file your claim online now,” Krumenauer wrote in an email.
The employment department is struggling to cope with an onslaught of jobless claims. Close to 300,000 Oregonians lost their jobs in the first weeks of the coronavirus outbreak as restaurants, bars and many other businesses shut down to contain the epidemic.
The department has been unable to process many claims because it still relies on a 1990s computer system to process claims. The state has been planning an overhaul since it received federal funding for an upgrade in 2009 but estimates the new computers won’t be fully in place until 2025.
Oregon’s antiquated computers frequently deny claims to people who are legally entitled to benefits, a problem that has exploded with the surge in claims. That’s resulted in jammed phone lines and delays in benefits to thousands of newly laid off workers.
Meanwhile, Oregon has been unable to adapt its computers to process changes in the jobless benefits system that Congress approved last month to alleviate the economic crisis brought on by the coronavirus. That means thousands of more unemployed Oregonians are not receiving full benefits.
For example, Oregon cannot process claims made by gig workers and the self-employed even though Congress made them eligible for benefits last month. The state has given no estimate of when it will be able to process their claims.
And Oregon has been unable to waive the “waiting week” – a period before for newly unemployed workers are eligible to start receiving financial benefits. Congress authorized state to waive the waiting period last month but Oregon, unlike other states, has been unable to implement the waiver.
Under pressure from Oregon’s congressional delegation, Gov. Kate Brown said last week the state will eventually waive the waiting period and make it retroactive to workers who already filed claims. But Brown said that will require “thousands of hours” of computer programming and gave no estimate of when that will take place.
This article has been substantially updated with the news the department has implemented a fix.
— Mike Rogoway | [email protected] | twitter: @rogoway |
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