Over the weekend, out-of-work Californians started flooding social media with complaints about not being able to get through to the Employment Development Department's website so they could certify their eligibility for unemployment benefits.
The EDD says the glitch is only impacting a certain group of applicants.
Though the agency hasn’t confirmed what’s causing the error messages, some of the processes weighing down its already fragile systems include a backlog of over 1 million people, going on two straight months, and up to 900,000 claims still in limbo out of the 1.4 million EDD froze late last year to combat fraud.
In mid-February, EDD confirmed a little over 400,000 of these frozen applicants had verified their claims. Since then, the agency hasn’t provided detailed figures, so it’s anyone’s guess as to how many people are stuck.
EDD is now trying to distribute funds from the American Rescue Plan Act, signed into law by President Biden a couple of weeks ago. The process is complicated, because EDD has to reconfirm the status of claims to make sure applicants are still on the right program, and then channel the appropriate amount of money into their accounts.
The agency has already said it could take until mid-April, if not later, to implement the necessary changes.
On top of all this, countless Californians are also reaching the one-year mark on their regular unemployment insurance claims, which means they have to refile their applications. This normally shouldn't be a problem, but the system is already so overloaded that if any error during refiling snags an application, fixing it can become another major hassle, and yet an additional opportunity for out-of-work Californians to get tangled in the system.
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