‘A cry for help’: SC residents wait on unemployment benefits while the bills stack up
“Out of food.”
“Behind two months on all my bills.”
“Facing repossession of my car.”
Those comments are among the more than a hundred on file with a South Carolina government watchdog tasked with investigating fraud and abuse.
But residents from across the Palmetto State weren’t calling and emailing about wasteful spending or government misconduct.
Faced with financial disaster, they just wanted their unemployment benefits.
Almost overnight after the COVID-19 emergency was declared, the S.C. Department of Employment and Workforce’s customer service center received close to 90,000 calls, said Brian Urban, interim assistant executive director for the agency’s unemployment insurance division.
Before, it averaged less than 10,000 in a week, he said.
The same was happening across the country, as the unemployment insurance system strained to meet the sudden flood of need.
As the pandemic wore on and joblessness numbers skyrocketed, so did South Carolinians’ cries for help.
The 111 coronavirus-related complaints registered in just over two months with the S.C. Inspector General’s Office show the depth of that need.
They provide a chilling portrait of the pandemic’s impact on South Carolina — and an unemployment system suddenly facing historic demand.
One Bamberg County resident said he had depleted his savings, couldn’t pay for prescriptions and faced a failing rural well pump.
“I am like a cow waiting to be slaughtered by this pandemic. PLEASE HELP,” he wrote in an April complaint.
He added one more thing.
He couldn’t reach DEW.
‘This is not normal’
When Urban gets off work, he scrolls through comments on DEW’s Facebook page.
Many detail issues with filing or certifying claims with the state’s unemployment insurance system or one of the several newly implemented federal relief programs.
The page is still awash with posts detailing technical glitches, or hours spent on hold with the agency.
A DEW spokesperson reported Thursday over 98% of callers are experiencing a wait time of under two hours.
“It’s really humbling,” Urban said. He finds himself texting claimant numbers to staff after hours.
“We want to hear from them all,” he said, adding that every comment is reviewed.
As the pandemic and the problems it created grew, his agency hired close to 500 customer service representatives. It also added Saturday hours and created an automated online help system — all while implementing three new federal relief programs that, under normal circumstances, would have undergone two- to three-month trial runs, he said.
The agency is still training new staff.
“UI (unemployment insurance) is a very complex program,” Urban said. “It’s not something that you’re going to learn overnight. It’s not something that you’re going to learn in a year.”
In April, administrators signed at least three short-term contracts — worth over $3.3 million in total — with private contractors to beef up call center staffing, purchase orders obtained through public records requests show.
Some advocates say the agency is doing too little too late and should have been better prepared.
“We shouldn’t be waiting until a crisis happens to be make sure that things work well,” said Sue Berkowitz, director of the S.C. Appleseed Legal Justice Center, a nonprofit advocacy organization. “This is what happens when you scramble and you don’t do proper planning.”
Urban believes the nature of the pandemic and the speed with which the illness affected every aspect of life made planning nearly impossible.
“You can’t anticipate these things,” said Urban, adding that he thought the agency was as well positioned as it could have been to respond to the crisis.
The state’s inspector general agrees.
“This is not normal,” said Brian Lamkin, whose office received complaints from scores of residents who couldn’t reach DEW for support with their unemployment claims.
Lamkin said his office forwarded every complaint to DEW.
The vast majority were from people who had never filed for unemployment before, he said.
‘A cry for help’
The complaints themselves cover a range of unemployment-related issues. The newspapers obtained them through public records request to the Inspector General’s Office.
Of the 133 complaints filed between March 6 and mid-May, 111 dealt with unemployment. The names of residents filing the complaints were withheld for privacy reasons.
Many referenced struggling to contact DEW to answer basic questions about their claims.
One resident wrote in an email in early April, “It is just me and my 5 month old and I am out of resources,” attaching a cell phone screenshot that displaying DEW’s phone number and a call time showing the caller had been on hold over four and a half hours.
There were also scores of complaints about basic technical issues residents couldn’t resolve without contacting customer service.
One Pickens resident reported in late April making 97 calls to DEW in a single day, according to a complaint.
Others reported waiting over a month to hear anything about their claim.
The agency has published a 17-page help document, addressing basic questions about error messages with its online system.
In some complaints, South Carolinians listed the conditions that drove their desperation.
Two people cited impending homelessness.
One couldn’t afford diabetic medicine.
“This is a cry for help as I need to gain access to the money i have had taken from me so i can feed myself and family and pay my bills,” said one Pee Dee resident, who said he’d called every business day for over two weeks, according to the complaint.
Four complaints, all filed in late March or early April, deal with debt collection practices employed by the agency. DEW may order wages withheld or garnish tax refunds to satisfy “overpayment” debts — when someone receives benefits they were not entitled to, whether unintentionally or because they knowingly provided false information to the agency.
Two other complaints claim the agency garnished wages or refunds in error, withholding thousands of dollars.
Two others reported difficulty receiving the remainder of much-needed tax refunds after they had been intercepted by the agency.
Urban said this kind of debt collection is employed only when all other collection efforts have failed over an extended period of time.
Once a refund is intercepted, he said, an “extensive audit” is conducted to determine whether a refund is warranted, which can take up to eight weeks, he said.
Asked if the agency considered suspending the practice during the pandemic, Urban said he decided to continue them to ensure the integrity of the trust fund that pays out unemployment benefits to South Carolina residents.
‘A lot of work left to do’
Over half a million initial unemployment claims have been filed since mid-March, and DEW has paid out over $1.5 billion in state and federal benefits, a spokesperson reported last week.
In April, South Carolina’s unemployment rate soared to 12.1%, the highest in the nearly 45 years the agency collected data, according to a news release.
“We’ve got a lot of work left to do. We’re not done until we’ve paid everybody what they’re entitled to,” said Urban.
An agency spokesperson said just under 350,000 people have received at least one payment from the state unemployment insurance or federal relief programs since the pandemic began.
The spokesperson said numbers about the current claims backlog couldn’t be provided, citing the complexity of multiple programs and claimants’ requirement to re-certify their claims each week.
The pain of the pandemic, financial and otherwise, seems the one constant.
As the restrictions on businesses ease and some head back to work, the true burden of the coronavirus will reveal itself as time wears on, said Berkowitz of the Appleseed Center.
“The fallout from all this, we haven’t even begun to see it,” she said.
Read the complaints to the S.C. Inspector General about unemployment insurance below
This story was originally published June 1, 2020 at 12:17 PM.
