California Employment Department Launches New Tool to Better Track Unemployment Claims

California's embattled Employment Development Department this week announced a new tool to track unemployment claims in greater detail.

One breakout on the dashboard shows weekly unemployment claims by county, with three Bay Area counties — Alameda, Contra Costa and Santa Clara — included in the list of counties with the top 10 highest number of claims for the week ending March 20.

Alameda County had the most claims in the region for that week, with nearly 4,900. But that's still far below some of the heaviest hitters on the list. Los Angeles County — the state's most populous — topped the chart with over 40,000 claims over that same week.

The new dashboard comes after a tough year for the agency, which since the start of the pandemic has been overloaded with unemployment claims that it has frequently failed to pay out on a timely basis. Consecutive reports from the California state auditor earlier this year called for greater transparency from EDD on how it tracks its unemployment data.

In a press release Friday, EDD reported a current backlog of more than 152,000 applicants — those who have been waiting for at least 21 days for action on their claims.

However, that figure doesn’t include the more than 900,000 people who still need to certify their claims to prove they are still eligible for unemployment, and the up to 900,000 more with accounts that EDD froze last year because of fraud concerns, who are still trying to verify their identities.

— Mary Franklin Harvin