NJ: 'Nonsensical' Unemployment Problem Needs Federal Solution

NEW JERSEY - There are 139,000 newly eligible residents this week joining the 725,000 already claiming weekly unemployment benefits, but Department of Labor and Workforce Development Commissioner Robert Asaro-Angelo will be the first to say they're not getting enough.

Asaro-Angelo said the state is trying to make alterations within the system, but since unemployment is a federal program, the US Department of Labor has the final say.

"They just issued strict guidance to the states noting that many of the out-of-the-box solutions we've been exploring such as temporarily suspending or amending the troublesome weekly certification process, cannot be enacted without putting the entire unemployment system, including the billions in cares act at risk," he said. "This isn't a dusty law we pulled off a bookshelf. This is a memo from this week."

Asaro-Angelo, speaking during Gov. Phil Murphy's Thursday COVID-19 news conference, said it's a "harsh reality that COVID-19 has swelled the nations' unemployment rolls to unprecedented numbers in a few short weeks as businesses as we knew it ground to an abrupt halt, here and everywhere else."

Asaro-Angelo said New Jersey's unemployment system is working as intended with nearly 800,000 unemployed and underemployed receiving state and federal benefits.

"That's more people than live in five US states," he said. "This means little to those still waiting for their benefits, and we want to do more."

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More than $2.7 billion dollars has been deposited into the bank accounts and onto the debit cards of eligible New Jersey workers and Asaro-Angelo thanked claimants for their patience and understanding as they work to get 100 percent of the eligible workers the benefits they are due.

Asaro-Angelo and his staff, however, haven't stopped trying to get more help. They have worked to make those new 139,000 claimants eligible on top of the tens of thousands that are normally being processed.

"It includes 60,000 claims in the third batch of the pandemic unemployment assistance," Asaro-Angelo said. "Meaning essentially everyone who is eligible for this new federal assistance and applied by April 12 has been processed. This is incredible work."

Asaro-Angelo noted they are still increasing worker capacity to help meet demands, but that isn't as easy as it might appear.

"An unemployment claims agent cannot simply be plucked off the street and sat in front of a computer screen," he said.

Asaro-Angelo was clear that handling sensitive personal information requires trust, and a state police background check and those things take time. Despite the limitations, he noted they are still working to expand their workforce capacity.

Federal Solution Needed

Asaro-Angelo said that there isn't much that can be done to fix the current system on New Jersey's end.

"Some of our neighbor states have spent hundreds of millions of dollars to fix their system to no avail, quite frankly. Just so you know I've been on these conference calls and I've been going to conferences in this job and my last job about UI systems and some state might have a prettier looking website than another but the behind the scenes architecture and the behind the scenes systems are quite frankly all the same," he said. "The fact that we need to interconnect with multiple systems across multiple states is part of the issue."

Asaro-Angelo mentioned that the jobs on the COVID-19nj.gov portal was put up and running in a week or two because it was all New Jersey data that the state houses and controls.

"We don't have that same luxury with the unemployment system. That was made by the federal government to store data going back to the 80s, 90s basically everybody's work histories for their entire work life," he said. "So it's not like we can start up a new system on our own. These things are interconnected with systems all over the country."

Asaro-Angelo did point out that his department has done much to make customer-facing improvements but in the end, there has to be a federal solution.

"I am hoping that one benefit that comes out of this is that we've never heard anyone in Congress talk about unemployment data systems, computer systems hopefully the attention to this will give us a federal response," he said. "We're all on 50 plus operating systems, different ways to apply, its totally nonsensical."

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