Unemployment audit shows years of negligence + record layoffs = disaster

Saw this headline on Friday, and I can see why Governor Evers asked Caleb Frostman to leave as the Secretary of the Wisconsin Department of Workforce Development.

Less than 1% of calls to state unemployment call centers were answered, audit shows https://t.co/AxtudZMj46 via @journalsentinel

— Molly Beck (@MollyBeck) September 26, 2020

In reading the report from the Legislative Audit Bureau, it notes that most claims never need to be phoned in at all. The ones that do are specialized cases that often require more technical help.

DWD requires most individuals to file online for unemployment benefits. Individuals may file through a call center only if they meet certain requirements, such as if they do not have internet access or if they cannot file online because, for example, their claims are based on having worked in Wisconsin and another state.

According to information that DWD reported weekly to the co-chairpersons of the Joint Legislative Audit Committee, 93.4 percent of all initial claims were filed online from April 26, 2020, through August 22, 2020, as shown in Table 1. The remaining 6.6 percent were filed by telephoning the call centers.

Even with the ability for many to file online, the overwhelmingly volume of calls, which were coming in at a rate that was 50-60 times the previous year, led to the predictable inability of most of those calls to get through.

From March 2019 through June 2019, individuals filed an average of approximately 4,700 initial claims for unemployment benefits each week. From March 15, 2019, through June 30, 2019, individuals made a total of 88,552 telephone calls to the program’s call center. DWD indicated that none of these calls was blocked….

We analyzed DWD’s data on the number of telephone calls to the call centers from the week of March 15, 2020, through the week of June 21, 2020. We also reviewed but did not independently confirm the accuracy of summary information that DWD reported to the co-chairpersons of the Joint Legislative Audit Committee from the week of June 28, 2020, through the week of August 16, 2020. As shown in Figure 2, 5.8 million telephone calls were made to the program’s call center during the week of April 12, 2020. The number of telephone calls declined after early-May 2020.

The fact that DWD couldn’t handle the number of calls makes a strategy the Walker Administration made in 2014 all the more false and harmful.

(insert 2015 audit language).

Walker and WisGOP figured that since all calls were being handled in a time of near-full employment, there wasn’t a need to add staff or invest in new technology. The problem was solved, so why worry!

That didn’t quite work out once we got the unprecedent number of claims that happened as a result of COVID-19’s breakout and the shutdowns that followed.

Beginning on May 8, 2020, DWD reported to the co-chairpersons of the Joint Legislative Audit Committee on the weekly numbers of telephone calls that were blocked, abandoned, and answered. However, DWD did not report on the number of telephone calls that resulted in individuals receiving busy signals. From April 26, 2020, through June 27, 2020, DWD reported that 4.9 million telephone calls were blocked. However, we found that over this time period a total of 19.6 million telephone calls were either blocked or resulted in busy signals. Individuals were unable to reach the call centers if their telephone calls were blocked or they received busy signals. DWD should modify its weekly reports to indicate the total number of telephone calls in which individuals were unable to reach the call centers, including telephone calls that were blocked and telephone calls that resulted in busy signals. Doing so will provide the co-chairpersons with complete information.

Once it became obvious that DWD couldn’t handle all of these new unemployment claims, they tried to hire Limited Term Employees (aka LTEs) to take phone calls, but it took a while to get those people hired and on-board.

As shown in Table 6, DWD hired a total of 98 call center staff from March 15, 2020, through July 31, 2020, including 56 LTEs. DWD began recruiting for these positions on March 23, 2020, but indicated that it needed time to review the 850 applications it received, conduct interviews, and perform background checks. DWD indicated that the hired staff received four weeks of training and, thus, were not ready to answer calls until June 8, 2020. ….

When that wasn’t enough, DWD signed contracts with private companies Alorica and Beyond Vision to get more people on the phones. However, the audit says that DWD failed to require that one of the contractors actually had the promised extra staff in place.

DWD contractually required Alorica to provide at least 500 full-time equivalent (FTE) staff positions. DWD did not contractually specify the date when Alorica needed to provide these positions, but it contractually required Alorica to provide the supervision and administrative support necessary to operate a call center of this size by May 21, 2020. DWD indicated that its contract contains no provisions for assessing monetary penalties because it needed to quickly execute the contract, and it believed that Alorica would comply with the contract to avoid a negative performance review. (headdesk) And as we saw with the regular DWD staff, it takes a while to get a bunch of people up to speed on often-complicated state unemployment rules, and to get the call center to hook into the company’s phone system.

Figure 4 shows the average daily number of FTE staff positions in Alorica’s call center. Not until the week of July 19 did more than a daily average of 500 FTE staff positions work in the call center. DWD indicated that it took time to provide Alorica’s call center staff with access to its IT systems, and that it was busy with other tasks, such as increasing the number of staff in its own call center and providing them with training and access to its IT systems.

And by July 19, the number of calls had already slowed down compared to the previous months. It’s nice that we have the extra staff as weather gets colder and more real-world layoffs happen, but that is little consolation to those who were out of work before July and waiting for benefits.

As shown in Figure 3, almost all telephone calls to the program’s call centers were blocked or resulted in busy signals each day from late-March 2020 through May 2020. Most of the remaining calls were abandoned. On almost all days in April 2020 and May 2020, less than 1.0 percent of all calls were answered. Beginning in June 2020, the proportion of telephone calls that were blocked or resulted in busy signals declined, and DWD reported that few calls were blocked or resulted in busy signals in August 2020. DWD provided us with summary information indicating that the program’s call centers received 55,698 telephone calls during the week of August 16, 2020, and it indicated that none of them was blocked or resulted in busy signals.