Thread by @JeffJacksonNC

DES UPDATE:

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

We all know that DES was hit with a tsunami and the number of daily claims is now 10x the normal number.

But it’s been eight weeks and there’s still a major backlog. So what’s going on?

Here’s the situation:

The two biggest problems at are: 1) not enough staff to answer the phones, and 2) not enough staff to process claims.

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).

There is also a chat function that was recently added to relieve phone pressure. 230 people are staffing the chat function with another 100 being added next week. The chat function is serving roughly 6,000 people per day.

Right now they’ve got 1,100 employees answering the phones each day. As of Monday they’ll add another 350.

That should - they say - give them enough capacity to handle the average daily call volume.

BUT - even that isn’t really sufficient.

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.

AND - it’s not enough to just answer the phone. They have to make sure the person who answers can actually help. And that’s been an issue. There have been many, many reports of employees not knowing what to do and transferring people only to have the call get disconnected.

There are basically two groups of employees who are answering the phones: Ones who work for DES and ones who work for a call center group called Maximus which was contracted to add capacity. The Maximus folks are doing most of the phone answering.

Their training process has been expedited and as a result a lot of these folks don’t really know the unemployment insurance regulations very well, which is leading to a lot of frustrating conversations.

For a lot of them it’s their first week on the job and they only know marginally more about this than the people calling.

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.

DES urgently needs to provide supplemental training based on the most common problems they’re hearing from callers.

These folks need to level up - quick.

Notably, almost half the calls to DES are people trying to check on the status of their claim. And the status of their claim is usually “pending.”

So let’s talk about what it means to be “pending” and why so many people haven’t heard back after submitting their claim.

And that gets to the second problem - not having enough staff to process claims.

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.

That’s a major backlog of unpaid claims, and it’s leading to folks flooding the phone lines asking, “What’s going on with my claim? It’s been 2/4/6/8 weeks?”

There are about 600 DES people available to process claims. Those are basically the only people who aren’t manning the phones all day.

Clearly, this number is insufficient.

DES needs to expand its staff to clear this backlog and develop automation procedures to move faster.

Right now, they say they are developing a plan for doing both of those things.

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.

DES was certainly hit with a tsunami. We were all sympathetic to their situation at the beginning of all this because it was truly unprecedented and they were swamped.

And since that time they’ve taken their staff from roughly 500 to 2,600, which is a major increase.

But if you’ve got 200,000 claims that are older than 14 days then you still don’t have enough staff - period.

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.

We should be well into plan execution by now.

For example: They obviously should have switched to 24-hour operations weeks ago. No good reason that didn’t happen.

Both parties in the legislature and the Governor are now clearly and intently focused on this.

We are getting dozens of emails a day from constituents about this and we are not going to let up.

There’s no more benefit of the doubt.

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.