Oregon’s new secretary of state said Thursday that her office will conduct yet another audit of the Oregon Employment Department, which suffered a catastrophic failure to pay jobless claims during the early months of the pandemic.
Prior audits in 2012 and 2015, and a string of investigations by The Oregonian/OregonLive, found the employment department was hobbled by an obsolete computer system and internal dysfunction in the years before the pandemic hit.
Gov. Kate Brown called for a fresh audit last year, and Secretary of State Shemia Fagan pledged her office would perform one during her campaign for the office last fall.
“This will be an audit to examine root causes for the substantive risks and performance issues related to the state’s Unemployment Insurance Program that arose during the COVID-19 pandemic,” the secretary of state’s office said Thursday. It outlined plans for nearly three-dozen other audits in 2021 and 2022.
The employment department relies on an antique, COBOL-based claims processing system from the 1990s, which it failed to replace despite receiving $86 million in federal money to upgrade the technology back in 2009.
Oregon still has most of that money and has at last selected a contractor to perform computer upgrades. It is still negotiating a contract and has estimated the project could cost $120 million. It projects finishing the work in 2025.
When the pandemic hit last year the department was utterly overwhelmed. That left hundreds of thousands of jobless Oregonians waiting months for payments while the department tried to sort through a flood of benefits applications.
The employment department’s last three directors all were fired or forced from their jobs amid severe problems within the agency.
An analysis by The Oregonian/OregonLive found that Oregon was among the slowest in the nation to pay jobless benefits last spring and summer, during the early months of the pandemic when workers were struggling to pay their rent and put food on the table.
In November, Oregon was the very last state in the nation to pay benefits for the first week workers were out of a job – money Congress had allocated in March. Most other states had paid that money many months earlier.
Oregon has paid $7.3 billion in claims during the pandemic to 550,000 Oregonian’s – a decade’s worth of benefits in less than a year.
The department has now paid the vast majority of claims from 2020 but thousands of people are still waiting for benefits. Many of those currently waiting are caught up in complications around expanded and extended benefits programs Congress authorized in December.
It remains extremely difficult to reach the employment department by phone. The department now has an online contact form that has produced faster responses for many who are seeking unpaid benefits.
On Wednesday, the employment department settled a class-action lawsuit over last year’s benefits delays. It agreed to promptly pay claims in the future, to be transparent about unpaid claims, and to do more to accommodate jobless workers who don’t speak English.
-- Mike Rogoway | mrogoway@oregonian.com | twitter: @rogoway |
"again" - Google News
February 05, 2021 at 08:02AM
https://ift.tt/3cHNCSg
Oregon will audit its employment department, again - OregonLive
"again" - Google News
https://ift.tt/2YsuQr6
https://ift.tt/2KUD1V2
Bagikan Berita Ini
0 Response to "Oregon will audit its employment department, again - OregonLive"
Post a Comment