Up to 1 Million Unemployment Claims Could Face Disqualification, EDD Says

Nearly 1 million unemployed Californians could have their claims disqualified starting Monday, according to a news release from the state’s Employment Development Department (EDD).

Late last year, EDD froze around 1.4 million accounts over concerns for fraud. As of Feb. 11, nearly 388,000 of those applicants have been verified by EDD. The remaining accounts are now subject to disqualification.

But, this figure doesn’t account for how many applicants have attempted to verify their identity and have been unable to get through EDD's identity verification system.

To be verified, applicants need to provide EDD with specified identity confirmation materials, like a valid driver's license or passport. But ID.me, the primary platform EDD uses for verification, has had notoriously long wait times. EDD even extended the length of time applicants had to verify their identities from 10 to 30 days in an acknowledgement of those delays.

Of the applicants who received verification notices via their unemployment insurance online accounts, EDD says about half haven’t even opened the messages.

But multiple advocates say that's because many people don’t regularly monitor the inboxes where EDD is sending these alerts, or even know they're there.

“They are unaware that there’s an inbox in there,” said Amos Lim, a community advocate with Chinese for Affirmative Action. “So EDD sends them a message and they don’t know until, you know, another big issue crops up or payments stop, and then we'll get a call saying, ‘Help! Help! I’m not getting payment anymore.’ ”

In these cases, Lim said he gets permission to log into the client’s account and often finds dozens of unread emails, if not more.

EDD has said that it is also texting applicants to encourage them to verify, but Daniela Urban, founder of the Center for Workers’ Rights, says there are access barriers with that method as well.

“So if [the verification link] gets texted to you, you need to be able to open that on a smartphone,” and not all of her clients have them, Urban said. That's left some applicants waiting for verification codes to come in the mail.

For people who were part of the big account freeze and are worried they may be at risk of disqualification, Urban suggests mailing or faxing acceptable identity documents to EDD as soon as possible.

“To at least allow them to say that they have substantially complied with the request for identity verification, even though they didn't comply through the method that EDD was requesting,” Urban said.

— Mary Franklin Harvin