Don't call Employment Security — it may be trying to call you

Carolyn Adolph

May 25, 2020 / 8:19 am

caption: Andy Aronis, Assistant General Manager of King's Hardware, smokes a cigarette outside of the boarded up bar and restaurant on Tuesday, March 17, 2020, on Ballard Avenue Northwest in Seattle. "I always felt good working in the bar industry because it's recession proof," said Aronis, who planned to file for unemployment. "The only thing you don't consider working in this industry is if there is a medical pandemic and then we are in the worst industry you could be in."

For weeks, people who are waiting for checks from Washington state’s embattled Employment Security Department have been calling and calling -- 100 calls a second.

But the agency says answering those calls has not been an efficient way to resolve claims.

This simple step prevents fraudsters from posing as you for unemployment money

Its new strategy is to make calls that clear cases instead of answering them. The agency says it wants to clear more than 50,000 cases that are stuck in adjudication by June 15. In the last week it managed to resolve only a few thousand, and the agency says it is learning more about how to further speed the process up.

Commissioner Suzi LeVine says those waiting for news of their claim should be getting information soon. That is cold comfort to Coeur d’Alene Harris, who does not know why the claim she filed in April remains in pending status.

Harris has been single-parenting three young children, including a 6-month-old baby. She says she is living on the last bit of her stimulus check. She thought she had resolved an issue with her social security number and had hoped for news this week.

She may have to sit tight. While the agency says it will resolve its backlog of adjudications by June 15, it is also saying that checking the identities of people who succeed with their claims will take an additional two days. The agency recently learned that identity thieves had bilked the state of hundreds of millions of dollars. It's adding this step to stave off additional losses.

Earlier this week the state said the official unemployment rate for April had surpassed 15%, a level not seen since the Great Depression. But in contrast to those times, the expansion of unemployment insurance and the addition of a $600 a week top up have been bulwarks against hardship during the government-led pandemic lockdown.

At least, they have been for those who have obtained assistance.

LeVine said she understood how important it is that everyone eligible receive support. But now the agency must balance between getting desperate people money and protecting the state from further losses of precious unemployment money.

"I want nothing more than to get those benefits out to those who so desperately need them. But we now have sophisticated criminals attacking us and impacting that efforts. How dare they?"

"Which is why we're not just focused on how do we fight the fraud and these criminals. But how do we do that in a way that has the least impact on legitimate claimants. There is an inherent tension between reducing the friction to getting benefits out to claimants in a timely fashion, and increasing the friction for criminals to keep them from perpetrating fraud on our systems and on our people."

"But no one can have all of both. Our charge is to find that right balance, which is what we are doing right now."