Summary
In March 2020, government directives ordered businesses to close and residents to stay at home in response to the COVID‑19 pandemic (pandemic). Millions of Californians were left unemployed and in critical need of assistance to replace some of the income on which they relied to pay for essentials such as housing and food. The Employment Development Department (EDD) administers the State's unemployment insurance (UI) program. The economic shutdowns in early 2020 led to historically high numbers of UI claims in a very short time (claim surge), and further shutdowns began in December 2020, raising the potential for additional spikes in unemployment. This audit reviewed EDD's response to the claim surge, its handling of the resulting backlog of unpaid claims, and the assistance it has provided to individuals through its call center. This audit report concludes the following:
Significant Weaknesses in EDD's Claims Processing and Workload Management Leave It at Risk of a Continuing Backlog of Claims.
EDD has presented unclear information about its claim backlog. In December 2020, EDD publicly reported a backlog of about 685,700 claims. However, fewer than 20,000 of these claims were waiting for payment because of EDD's failure to resolve an issue with them. EDD's presentation of backlog information has led to confusion about its performance during the pandemic. Nevertheless, when claims rose dramatically in mid-March, EDD's inefficient processes contributed to significant delays in its payment of UI claims. Specifically, EDD was unable to automatically process nearly half of the claims submitted online between March and September 2020; instead, many of these claims required manual intervention from staff. As a result, as of September 2020, the timeliness of payments to claimants had declined when compared to the year before. Hundreds of thousands of claimants waited longer than 21 days—EDD's measure of how quickly it should process a claim—to receive their first benefit payment. Beginning in March 2020, EDD began modifying its practices and processes to increase the rate at which it automatically processes online claims, eventually reaching an automation rate of more than 90 percent by November 2020. However, it is unlikely to sustain that rate when it returns to post‑pandemic operations because of the short-term nature of some of the automation measures it has taken to address the backlog.
Because EDD Responded to the Claim Surge by Suspending Certain Eligibility Requirements, Many Californians Are at Risk of Needing to Repay Benefits.
In March 2020, the secretary of the Labor and Workforce Development Agency (agency secretary) directed EDD to pay claimants UI benefits before determining whether they met key program eligibility requirements, and EDD expanded this directive to include most program eligibility determinations. In April 2020, the agency secretary further directed EDD to temporarily stop collecting the certifications claimants must regularly submit that assert they remain eligible for benefits. Although both directives were designed to provide Californians with benefit payments as quickly as possible, the United States Department of Labor had not waived the federal requirements addressed by the directives and has since questioned the actions EDD took. As a result, EDD now faces the challenge of processing delayed determinations and certifications of eligibility, which will require significant time and resources, and it has not adequately planned how it will address this impending workload. These actions also removed a barrier to fraud, and claimants who applied in good faith may have to repay the benefits they received if EDD finds them retroactively ineligible for some or all of those benefits.
EDD Took Uninformed and Inadequate Steps to Resolve Its Call Center Deficiencies.
Even before the claim surge, EDD struggled to answer claimants' calls. Once the claim surge began, EDD's call center performance deteriorated dramatically: it answered less than 1 percent of the calls it received. EDD quadrupled its available call center staff to more than 5,600 people in response to its call center problems, but these staff were often unable to assist callers and only marginally improved the percentage of calls it answered. Despite knowing for years that it had problems in the call center, EDD has not yet adopted best practices for managing the call center or for providing assistance to callers—such as tracking the reasons why claimants call and whether it resolves callers' issues—leaving it less prepared to effectively assist the many Californians attempting to navigate the claim process for the first time as a result of the pandemic.
Despite Multiple Warnings, EDD Failed to Prepare for an Economic Downturn.
During the Great Recession of 2008 and 2009, EDD experienced many problems similar to those we note in this report. Further, it has been aware of deficiencies with its claim process and call center for years. Nonetheless, in March 2020, EDD had no comprehensive plan for how it would respond if California experienced a recession and UI claims increased correspondingly. The 2020 claim surge was unprecedented and would have presented significant challenges no matter how prepared EDD was, but it failed to act comprehensively to prepare for downturns and to address known deficiencies. As a result, its areas of weakness became key deficiencies in its response to the claim surge, and these were a cause of serious frustration for unemployed Californians in need of assistance.
Selected Recommendations
Legislature
The Legislature should require EDD to do the following:
- Report at least once every six months on its website the amount of benefit payments for which it has required repayment and the amount repaid.
- Develop a recession plan so that it is well prepared to provide services during economic downturns. The planning process should consider lessons learned from previous economic downturns, including the recent pandemic-related claim surge.
EDD
By March 2021, EDD should revise its public dashboards about the number of backlogged claims to clearly describe the difference between those waiting for payment and those that are not.
By June 2021, EDD should determine how many of its temporary automation measures for claims processing it can retain and by September 2021, it should make those a permanent feature of its claims processing.
To address its deferred eligibility determinations, EDD should immediately begin performing a risk assessment of its deferred workloads and determine the most appropriate order in which to progress through the work.
To improve its call center performance, by May 2021 EDD should begin tracking the reasons why callers need assistance and tracking whether it resolves caller issues successfully.
Agency Comments
EDD acknowledged that it must make improvements to its administration of the UI program. It agreed with all of our recommendations and indicated it would implement all of them.