For hundreds of thousands of North Carolinians, the most important issue right now is the inability of our Division of Employment Security (DES) to process unemployment insurance claims and send out checks in anything resembling a timely manner.
[thread] #ncpol
But it’s been eight weeks and there’s still a major backlog. So what’s going on?
Here’s the situation:
They’re getting about 50k calls/day. Last week, about half the calls were being answered. Now it’s about 80% (assuming you’re willing to hold for several hours).
That should - they say - give them enough capacity to handle the average daily call volume.
They really need to staff beyond average daily capacity to make sure they bring down wait times and can handle days (like last Monday) when calls topped 70,000.
This is a serious problem given that the online applications can be confusing and people who need clarification or to correct an entry need to call DES.
These folks need to level up - quick.
So let’s talk about what it means to be “pending” and why so many people haven’t heard back after submitting their claim.
In the last eight weeks, DES has paid 530,000 claims. They now have 270,000 unpaid claims. 200,000 of those unpaid claims are more than 14 days old.
Clearly, this number is insufficient.
DES needs to expand its staff to clear this backlog and develop automation procedures to move faster.
And right now you’re saying, “What do you mean they’re developing a plan?? It’s been eight weeks!”
And that gets to the truly frustrating part about all of this.
And since that time they’ve taken their staff from roughly 500 to 2,600, which is a major increase.
And to still be under-staffed eight weeks into this crisis is simply unacceptable. To be in “plan development” at this point in the process is a major problem.
For example: They obviously should have switched to 24-hour operations weeks ago. No good reason that didn’t happen.
We are getting dozens of emails a day from constituents about this and we are not going to let up.
There’s no more sympathy for an overburdened system.
The only thing that matters at this point is actually getting people their checks so they can put food on the table and pay rent.