More on Wisconsin's unemployment issues

Wanted to give a follow-up to my post yesterday on WisGOP's duplicity in whining about Wisconsinites not being able to get unemployment benefits...after they're the ones that made it harder to get to those benefits.

Former UW-Madison Professor Pamela Herd noted my post (disclosure: Prof. Herd taught a class of mine in grad school, and we know each other), and added some important context to it. Herd and fellow professor/husband Don Moynihan wrote an award-winning book in late 2018 on how government agencies are increasingly use red tape to keep people from benefits.

Herd adds that few states "succeded" more than Wisconsin in trying to keep people from getting unemployment in 2010s.

Walker instituted a series of changes that made it harder to apply for benefits, similar to Florida, by making the application process unnecessarily cumbersome, including longer applications and online applications that didn't functional well 3/ pic.twitter.com/aOzGpD8bmC

— Pam Herd (@pamela_herd) May 23, 2020

Even worse, Herd notes that Wisconsin government has turned "fraud investigations" into a money-making scheme in recent years.

The result is that for the last five years Wisconsin is *the only state* consistently collecting, on an annual basis, substantially more than the benefits mistakenly received. Since 2015 they've collected 160% of 'owed' benefits 5/ pic.twitter.com/1MPvNhJXx4

— Pam Herd (@pamela_herd) May 23, 2020

Unemployment lawyer Victor Forberger has additional insight on his blog as to why there are delays after the Wisconsin DWD receives the paperwork. Some of this is due to the unprecedented number of claims, but also because each document needs to be scanned and checked, which takes up large amounts of time.

My sources within the Department indicate that the Department is weeks behind on processing the documents claimants and employers are submitting by fax or by mail. And, by processing, I mean simply scanning the documents into the Department’s computer system and associating those scanned documents with the correct claimant and employer.

Note: as of mid-April: UCB-23 forms (weekly wage confirmation notices) were being scanned from 4/6/20 with ~16,000 in the queue; UCB-16 forms (separation notices) were being scanned form 3/30/20 with ~54,000 in the queue; ~40 mail bins dating from 4/10/20 had yet to have their contents even opened. ....

And, it appears that the Department is ignoring this backlog when deciding cases and scheduling hearings. I had a hearing on Monday, May 11th, in which there was only seven days notice. As a result, the documents I submitted in a letter dated May 5th were NOT available to the administrative law judge. Luckily, those documents were made available through other mechanisms during the hearing. But, if those other mechanisms had failed, the hearing would have had to be postponed until another several weeks had passed.

Claimants have also contacted me about their claims being denied for failing to provide requested documents. They did provide the requested documents on time, but the deadline passed without those documents being uploaded into the Department’s system. So, rather than account for this backlog, the adjudicator/investigator denied the claim because the requested documents were not yet available in the system and dinged the claimants for failing to respond on time.

Also, Forberger noted that there were significant delays in processing the Pandemic Unemployment Assistance (PUA) claims that go to "gig economy" workers and other professions that weren't covered by regular UI. The DWD says that they have received over 81,000 applications in the month that program has been up and running, but broadcast reports from this week indicate that few (if any) PUA checks have gone out to Wisconsinites.

But this is where the administrative burdens that Professor Herd mentions come in to play. Because DWD offices have to spend so much time making sure claims are legitimate and that the forms are filled out properly, it prevents unemployed Wisconsinites from getting their benefits in a timely fashion. Especially if they are filing new claims and there is no previous/recent record of them in the Unemployment system.

And let me note again that not only did WisGOPs vote to put those barriers into place, and have a bias toward turning down benefits instead of providing assistance, they also refused to add staff to DWD in case such an economic emergency would happen that would require a record number of applications to be pushed through in a short period of time. And now you're seeing the train-wreck results of this predictable form of "out of sight, out of mind" governance.

If WisGOP wants to fix this, there is nothing stopping John Nygren from calling a hearing as co-chair of the Joint Finance Committee and reallocating state funds to add positions to handle processing. But it's much easier for Johnny and the Assembly's Number 2 to pass the buck with tweets like this.

This is unconscionable. It was understandable, maybe, for the first 2 weeks given the enormity of the influx of claims. Now, it’s mismanagement on an epic scale that is putting people at risk. Legislative offices are getting flooded w/calls & emails from desperate constituents. https://t.co/9HZ5yox3jq

— Jim Steineke (@jimsteineke) May 20, 2020

And GOP hack McCoshen gives away the real motivation behind WisGOP's sudden concern about services to the unemployed, with this spinning (and mixing) of poll numbers.

If accurate, this would be a 12 point drop for @GovEvers in a week. https://t.co/hRefLf2cS5

— Bill McCoshen (@billmccoshen) May 22, 2020

Look at that smirk from a guy whose whole adult life has been in politics. These people don't give a damn about better governance or stabilizing the tenuous situations of so many Wisconsinites. All they care about is scoring points with low-info voters. PATHETIC.