[ad_1]
The “fraud check” process is one of the key reasons 1.2 million people have been waiting 9 months for help. That and some states are still using systems built on COBOL, cutting edge coding back in the 1960s, to process claims. What those two things have in common is a long-lasting Republican effort, aided for too many years by weak-kneed Democrats, to destroy government. They have instilled the idea that working people have to prove their worthiness for assistance, operating under the presumption of unworthiness and knowing that by throwing up hurdle after hurdle for people to get assistance, they’ll just give up and suffer. To make it even worse, they’ve kept the unemployment system centered in states and provided little in the way of federal help for states to run them. Including refusing to allow $1 billion in funding in the latest coronavirus relief package—the House provided it, Mitch McConnell refused it.
The clunky system, the lack of staffing for many of them, and the amount of hoops workers and state employees have to jump through to verify eligibility have all combined to create months-long holdups for things as minor as typos in forms. Or a worker providing a driver’s license scan instead of a photo. Or someone having to provide a photo of the blank back page of their birth certificate, maybe to prove that there was no secret information there that showed they were actually undocumented or something. That actually happened. Michelle Stoltenberg of Pittsburgh uploaded scans of her driver’s license, her passport, her utility bills, and her birth certificate. The state told her she had to send a photograph of her driver’s license, and then “she was told she needed to upload a photo of the back of her birth certificate—even though it’s blank. She did that, too.” That was in July. “This has gone on for five months,” she told the Post. “My trust in my government is just fundamentally broken now.”
Which, again, has been the Republicans’ plan all along. She did get the more than $10,000 in back pay, finally, after the Post inquired about it. That was after her former employer, her state senator, and a law professor in her acquaintance advocated for her at the state. This is just the people who are waiting to be declared eligible the first time around, not even those who have been denied on the first round and are waiting for their appeals to be heard. That’s taking an average of at least 82 days, according to Labor Department data.
The Trump administration made “fraud prevention” a key priority in the UI process, and that’s what the states have been doing. One of the labor commissioners who agree to provide a comment to the Post, Mark Butler, asserts that there has been rampant fraud in the system. “A huge portion of the issues we have seen with claims stem from individuals who have quit, have been fired, or have not had a job in the past year who believe they are owed benefits from the state regardless of their separation reason,” Butler said in a statement. “We are responsible for making lawful benefit determinations based on the evidence presented in each case.”
The first responsibility should be making sure people survive on the assumption that every worker who has been paying taxes deserves that, especially in a pandemic. And yes, everyone should have gotten that $2,000 in survival pay Mitch McConnell killed. They should have been getting that $2,000 every month of this pandemic.
As it stands, this is just one more huge issue that President-elect Joe Biden and the new Congress are going to have to try to fix right away to try to simply save lives and put the economy on stable footing. In the meantime, if you’re one of the 1.2 million in UI limbo, call the Post or your local news. It seems to be the most sure way of getting a response.
[ad_2]
Source link
