Name: U.S. senators call for federal investigation of Florida’s ‘uniquely poor’ handling of unemployment
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U.S. senators call for federal investigation of Florida’s ‘uniquely poor’ handling of unemployment

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AdvertisementBy Orlando SentinelJun 08, 2020 at 5:13 pmTwo top-ranking U.S. senators on Monday called for a federal investigation into Florida’s “uniquely poor” response to the millions of workers who have lost their jobs during the coronavirus outbreak, accusing Republican Govs. Ron DeSantis and Rick Scott of failing to fix the state’s hamstrung unemployment compensation system.Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-New York, and Ron Wyden, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee from Oregon, sent a letter requesting that U.S. Department of Labor Inspector General Scott Dahl investigate and audit the Florida Department of Economic Opportunity’s “failure to process unemployment claims and deliver benefits in a timely fashion and whether its unemployment programs are being administered in accordance with guidelines established by the CARES Act.”AdvertisementIt’s unclear if such an investigation will be taken up by the Department of Labor, but the call from Schumer and Wyden has the potential to bring federal scrutiny over the state’s unemployment system that at one point even DeSantis described as “broken.”For months now, hundreds of thousands of out-of-work residents have tried to navigate the inundated system, with many reporting they had to apply in the middle of the night to get through.Advertisement“While all states have seen record increases in the number of its residents applying for unemployment, the state of Florida’s performance has proved uniquely poor in its abject inability to assist millions of Florida residents who have applied for and continue to await unemployment benefits,” Schumer and Wyden wrote.Citing “persistent, critical flaws with the state’s unemployment systems,” including problems with the online CONNECT portal and cuts made under former Gov. Scott, the senators said Florida failed to implement the expanded unemployment insurance benefits that were enacted by the federal CARES Act. In all, they said the DEO has processed only 28% of the nearly 2 million claims that have been filed since March 15.Asked about the letter at a press briefing in Miami on Monday, DeSantis chalked it up to a political attack.“Well, I’ve never heard of partisan politics in Washington, D.C., before. Oh, my goodness. Can you imagine that?” DeSantis told reporters. “Look, these guys are very partisan. That’s all they’re doing.”Tiffany Vause, a spokeswoman for DEO, said, “Senator Schumer and Senator Wyden unfortunately have their facts wrong.”DeSantis has blamed Deloitte Consulting, the company hired in 2010 to build the CONNECT system, for the backlog of unpaid claims. On May 4, DeSantis , calling it a bad use of taxpayers’ money.“There’s going to be a whole investigation that’s going to need to be done about how the state of Florida could have paid $77 million for this thing,” DeSantis said previously. A potential class-action lawsuit accusing DEO of negligence and breach of its fiduciary duties also is currently working its way through the courts.DeSantis has also said user error is the reason that many applications have been deemed ineligible and rejected. In mid-May, the governor boasted that 97.6% of valid individual claims had been paid, not factoring in the almost half a million claims at the time that he said had not been paid out because of mistakes on the applications or because the applicant was ineligible.AdvertisementAs of Monday, Florida has paid more than $4.6 billion to nearly 1.25 million people, according to a dashboard DEO updates daily. The dashboard says 92.5% of eligible people have been paid.But in mid-April, as and 16.2% in metro Orlando, only 4% of applications had been processed.Florida also was slow in making available federal programs enacted by the CARES Act, including Pandemic Unemployment Assistance for individuals ineligible for state benefits and Pandemic Emergency Unemployment Compensation that provides an additional 13 weeks of pay to Florida workers who have already exhausted the state’s meager 12 weeks of assistance.Both programs were approved in late March, to “expediently provide payments" Schumer and Wyden said, but it wasn’t until late April that Florida integrated the application for PUA into its system and not until late May that PEUC assistance became available.So far, 151,375 of the 201,557 residents who have applied for PUA benefits have been paid, and 12,736 of the 16,445 who have applied for PEUC have received payments.The senators blamed Scott and DeSantis, saying “inaction from both current and past gubernatorial administrations in Florida left FLDEO completely unprepared.”AdvertisementWeeklyA weekly update on health news in Florida. &gt; But Scott, DeSantis and others have said there was no way Florida could have anticipated the skyrocketing unemployment the pandemic caused.“Every state in the country has faced challenges dealing with the unprecedented volume of suddenly unemployed workers. The important thing is to get relief to people who need it as fast as possible, and Senator Scott will continue working with his colleagues, as well as state and local officials, to do just that,” Scott spokeswoman Sarah Schwirian said, adding that “Senator Schumer should be focused on solving the problems in his own state.”However, Schumer and Wyden, pointed to audits performed in 2015, 2016 and 2019 that uncovered multiple flaws with CONNECT, the $77 million system.DEO’s chief financial officer Damon Steffens told a judge in May that the system was originally designed to handle only 5,000 users. After the pandemic struck, he said the department spent $10 million adding more servers and staff to process applications more quickly and so the system could handle 80,000 users — still only a fraction of the individuals in need of relief.Cuts to the state’s unemployment program have also made it more difficult for workers to access benefits, the senators said, including widespread post-recession changes that restricted who qualified for unemployment and limited weekly payments to $275 a week, among the lowest in the country.Florida Democratic Party Chair Terrie Rizzo in a statement said she hoped the request for a federal investigation "brings us closer to getting answers about why this happened and what is being done to prevent history from repeating itself.”AdvertisementNews Service of Florida contributed to this report. Email the reporter at and follow on Twitter . Advertisement

AdvertisementBy Orlando SentinelJun 08, 2020 at 5:13 pmTwo top-ranking U.S. senators on Monday called for a federal investigation into Florida’s “uniquely poor” response to the millions of workers who have lost their jobs during the coronavirus outbreak, accusing Republican Govs. Ron DeSantis and Rick Scott of failing to fix the state’s hamstrung unemployment compensation system.Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-New York, and Ron Wyden, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee from Oregon, sent a letter requesting that U.S. Department of Labor Inspector General Scott Dahl...

U.S. senators call for federal investigation of Florida’s ‘uniquely poor’ handling of unemployment

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