waiting and waiting. I should not have to wait months upon months out of work and in need of help. Those people deserve their money caught up in pennsylvania's unemployment system, the phone lines are constantly busy, the backlog of claims is down considerably from the height of the pandemic. But tens of thousands of pennsylvanians are still trying to file a claim and then it's crickets. I hear nothing for weeks. You don't sleep much when you I've never had to endure that before. Now, fraud is also messing up the system and the state labor Department has its own labor problem. Not enough staff certainly needs corrected because this can never happen again. Tonight in this W. G. A L chronicle unemployment breakdown. The eight on your side team investigates what happened who's affected and what needs to be done to get people their money. No other issue has generated the viewer emails questions, uncertainty and frustration like the problems facing the pennsylvania unemployment compensation program. We're hearing from you every day and that's why the aid on your side team decided to investigate to show you how we got here and what can be done to improve the system. People are waiting months to get their money money they desperately need. That includes a Lancaster County woman who waited six months to find out if she was eligible for benefits. Mhm lisa stevens has been a nurse for more than 30 years. She has recently been working at Merrick Ian hummels town helping residents with developmental and behavioral issues. Oh I love my job, I love My residents, their their family do you qualify? But when Lisa needed help from the state, the system failed to communicate. You just don't know the nights that I have not slept. The Lancaster County woman on the advice of her employer filed for unemployment compensation, August 20 2021 after taking family medical leave because of kidney disease and a scheduled surgery. She filed a claim week after week but heard nothing, kept filing, putting the information in and calling to see if I could possibly ever get ahold of somebody. And when she tried emailing she often got this message. It was stressful, very stressful. And then with not receiving anything. That's why I had to return back to work before my actual surgery. I'm responding to your legislative submission, lisa eventually turned to the office of state Representative brian Cutler for help. We still have people who are waiting from their initial filing and that's unacceptable. The speaker of the house says labor and industry should have updated its system long before the pandemic. When filers overwhelmed it, it should have been, we had appropriated money for it and they failed to do their job. Lisa finally received a call from L and I after contacting Cutler's office. This means that I qualify. She thought she was finally going to receive benefits but now she's been told she's not eligible since she was not able and available for work. She's wondering why it took months to receive that devastating news. It's broken, It is a broken system from the ground up. Something needs to change. Lisa says her brother and sister in law helped her and her husband financially making sure they did not go without. And she says she is continuing to appeal her case. The state's unemployment compensation center is facing two big problems lack of staff and fraud. And those fraudsters are pretty sophisticated. It's getting better. But every time it's like playing whack a mole. Every time we put something in place to try to find a new way to get in. Tom Lehman has been following this unemployment problem for months reports on the current state of the unemployment system. Mhm. That sound is the sound a lot of people trying to file for unemployment have gotten used to hearing, I'm just like stuck and I don't know what else to do. Christine McLucas has not been able to file for unemployment for some time. She found out she was a victim of fraud through identity theft. Getting someone on the phone to help her has been difficult and she's been unable to file claims since august kind of have to make a choice of what bills to pay and what bills I just can't pay. How did things get so bad. How we got here is we were faced with a global pandemic labor and industry secretary jennifer barrier is in charge of the agency that runs the unemployment compensation system. A system that became a lifeline of money for millions of pennsylvanians amid layoffs and closures because of the pandemic. Our system was not set up to to withstand that sort of stress. The labor and industry department says close to $50 billion worth of some sort of unemployment benefit has been paid out to pennsylvanians since the start of the pandemic. And while the backlog of unresolved cases has gone down from the hundreds of thousands to tens of thousands, many pennsylvanians still don't have an answer about whether they will be getting paid or not. There are a lot of very complicated issues that unfortunately take a lot of time and require information from multiple parties and complicating that backlog. Our staffing shortages and massive fraud worth billions of dollars. Close to $16,000 was claimed from July until February of 2022 people like Veronica Tobin are going without cash. Someone filed for unemployment under her name when she actually found herself unemployed, she couldn't get paid for the week she needed to do. I put food on the table or do I let my car notes go. Do I let the rest go. Do I go out on the streets. I mean what's actually going to happen next tom Lehman, Wgcl News pennsylvania's problems didn't start during the pandemic. They've been brewing for decades. A former watchdog sounded the alarm years ago. This system needs to get fixed immediately because God forbid we ever have a recession and you know, I think it was maybe eight months later. Covid hit Next News eight digs into why the state used a system from the 19 sixties for so long. The state unemployment office has its own unemployment problem. It needs employees. Mm hmm. Unfortunately we have a 50% turnover rate which is extremely high. How many employees the state needs and why it's having a hard time hiring them. As we've been telling you, nothing has generated more questions from our viewers in the last year or so than this issue of unemployment compensation. Tonight, right after this Chronicle, WGCL News Eight's Tom Lehman and I will be answering your questions about our investigation during a facebook live event. Now I want to stress to you that we cannot address questions about your specific claims, but we can talk about the fraud that we found and the challenges facing the Department of Labor and industry that's coming up right after this Chronicle special on our W G A L facebook page and it was probably well over 200 times before it finally answered frustration desperation. People trying to file for unemployment Welcome back to this WGCl Chronicle unemployment breakdown. The eight on your side team has been investigating what led to these problems and what's being done to fix them. The state launched its new unemployment compensation system last June it replaced a system that had been in place for more than 40 years. Some have been calling for this upgrade. Four years former Pennsylvania Auditor General Eugene DePasquale and his team put out a warning in 2017. The information in this audit report is stunning. Five years ago then auditor General Eugene DePasquale raised a red flag after his team audited the Department of Labor and Industry investigation found that in a four year period, the department received 178 million in funding to update the unemployment compensation computer system. But that didn't happen. The reality is we don't know how they spent the money. The system was on the verge of collapse. Today, DePasquale stands by his office's findings and says something should have been done a long time ago. Look, let's be clear about this. What we found was 20 years in the making. So the fact that it Only that that process really only began in the 2018, It should have as as our audit pointed that started years earlier. But even after the audit, the system wasn't changed. The unfortunate thing was nobody disagree with our findings, but then they started pointing fingers at each other. DePasquale believes both sides of the aisle should have taken his warning seriously. Covid and the disaster that happened. Certainly no one could have predicted that. But the idea that we would never have an economic downturn was unrealistic. While DePasquale is now in the private sector, He believes his audit recommendations are still valid periodically. There should always be a systems check. He's happy to see a new system is finally in place and any new system is going to have bumps. I mean that's you know, just but but it should have started earlier. That that's the problem. Now at the time of the audit, the unemployment compensation computer system had dated back 40 years. In 2006, the state did hire IBM to upgrade that system, but court records showed the state paid IBM $170 million 2013. At that point, the project was four years behind schedule and $60 million dollars over budget. A study done by Carnegie Mellon shows that little to none of the work that was done was even usable. Then in 2013 the lawmakers passed Act 34 in an effort to fund and push forward improvements. In 2016 that funding stream was stopped. Call centers were closed and 400 labor and industry employees lost their jobs. While they had hoped to reopen those centers, most have remained shuttered. The state agency set up to help people without jobs has had big problems finding and hiring employees and without enough workers calls and questions don't get answered quickly. W. G A. L. Newsday's Tom Lehman reports on labor and industries search for workers. Do we have enough staff know which is why we're trying to bring on staff as quickly as possible. Labour and Industry Secretary Jennifer Barrier says there are just too few people working on unemployment compensation during the Great Recession. There were more than 1500 staffers working on. You see there are hundreds fewer people today working on that program. She estimated it's around 950 staffers in total. And we're handling a substantially larger workload than we did back then. Barrier also says an internal study showed staffing at UC. Service centers should be as high as 2500 during times like a pandemic and as high as 2000 during normal times. The department brought on hundreds of contracted staffers in 2021 to help but lost access to most of them after federal covid unemployment programs expired. So why is it so hard to hire people to pick up the phone? These jobs are very tough jobs within the UC program area and we have about a 50% turnover rates. A spokesman for L. And I also said the starting salary for a call center job comes in at $36,245 annually. The case is still in the fraud department at the unemployment office with With no follow ups or anything Veronica Tobin is an unemployment fraud victim who lost a job earlier this year. She says she's waiting for the unemployment fraud unit, a group that as of early April had less than 20 staffers to resolve the fraudulent activity on her account until that happens. She can't file for unemployment claims. We're talking about thousands of people are in the same boat. And the thing is that they're struggling. They're probably facing eviction. They may end up losing their vehicles. They have Children to support. Barrier told lawmakers last month that there were more than 30,000 unresolved fraud cases for state unemployment compensation. She said a short term fix was being put in place with more than 100 unemployment tax agents being temporarily reassigned to work overtime and help clear fraud cases. That will help significantly. But even with all that extra help, barrier warned lawmakers that it took years to clean up unfinished business from the great recession and expects the same with problems stemming from the pandemic in Harrisburg's Tom Lehman, WGCL News AIDS And if and when you finally get through you may run into another problem fraud. It just blows my mind how this could happen. The state says this woman was getting her money but she wasn't what happened to the money that she desperately needed. Mhm. Mhm. That makes me sick that this could happen. She's talking about fraud fraud with the state's unemployment system. I spoke with a woman who was supposed to be getting money but it was going somewhere else. So tell me what happened to you. I believe that I am a victim of a fraudster After receiving unemployment benefits in early 2020 for about six months Stacy Jane Bechtel was fortunate enough to get a job. Then she lost that job because of COVID and other health issues and she reapplied for unemployment compensation. I received messages that my claim was still under review And this went on for months. Like many other Pennsylvanians Stacy Jane's says she would dial the phone for hours at a time and could not reach anyone at the unemployment office for 10 months. She waited and then one day I never received any notice that the claim actually had been approved until the payments started and they told me that I had received payments and I said no, I haven't received any payments. When you found out these payments supposedly to you were being made, they were not coming to you correct, correct. Where were they going? They were being directed to a welsh barco account and there they are. When Stacy jane logged into her dashboard on the unemployment website, the payments were being displayed. She went through her own bank to determine exactly where they were going. That's when they confirmed with me that that rowdy number wasn't even associated with my account. It was actually associated with an account either in Arkansas or Alabama. She filed a fraud claim with the state and was stunned by the response just recently, I got an email telling me that my fraud claim has been reviewed and they found no fraud on my claim. But clearly someone got Stacy Jane's money and now she has a tax form to prove it. I received a 1099 for over 14,000 was paid but this is just one type of fraud. People are filing and then learning there are victims of identity theft leading to even more frustration. It would have saved me many headaches and sleepless nights wondering when I'm going to be able to get this rectified and get my claim filed. We asked the state how this fraud is happening and how it can be resolved. One word failure. That's how this man describes the unemployment compensation system in pennsylvania. It took him nine months to file his claim. The reason he was a victim of identity theft. As the eight on your side team investigating the unemployment breakdown, we found what the state is doing to stop it from happening to others. It was a letter from us bank last july that got mike feel men's attention right away. My request for my address change information was completely was completed successfully. Problem was mike had not moved and he had also not filed for unemployment benefits which prompted the letter from the bank. I informed them that I had been gainfully employed for years and I was not filing any benefit claim for unemployment. Mike did the right thing and notified the state he was not unemployed and not entitled to any benefits, assuming the false claim would be purged from the state's system but six months later Mike lost his job and really did have to file for unemployment at that time. They are were unable to file a new claim for me because the fraudulent information was still in their system. Three months after his first claim, Mike is still fighting for unemployment compensation. This was something that I was a victim of that. I had no responsibility in. Remember that letter mike got from U. S. Bank. It arrived last july about a month after the state Labor Department switched to a new unemployment compensation website. But nearly six weeks passed before the state started using an identity verification system. I'd me on its website and helps make sure you're you to confirm an applicant's information. Why did they not go online simultaneously? Remember? It's it's a process you know to get a new system like that, it's years in the making. Um and so you know to add something additional with delay, everything despite that six week delay. Ellen I says its new system and identity verification app involves a one time password prevented more fraud. We saw a lot of claims established but we didn't see a lot of payments go out as a result of those claims because of those background security checks and fraud fraud filters but unemployment fraud losses have been staggering. The U. S. Labor Department's Inspector general told Congress a few weeks ago that estimated losses from pandemic unemployment payment fraud are estimated at $163 billion in january. The pennsylvania Labor Department confirmed that its coordinating with federal partners on an investigation into what appears to be a coordinated effort to get into government systems to commit unemployment fraud. I asked the State Department of Labor and Industry about its fraud prevention. It tells me at least $1.2 billion in fraud was prevented by the I. D. Me system. Like many people across the state, the people that we spoke to their situations are still not resolved. Mike Filmon is still waiting for answers. He says he is getting information from the state though and his issue is being addressed as far as the other fraud victim, Stacey Jayne Bechtel. She's actually moved out of state and is not holding out much hope of getting her money. The woman I spoke with lisa stevens waited months to find out she was denied benefits. But she is appealing that decision. We also want to update you on the people tom Lehman interviewed veronica Tobin. She's still waiting for the money she's owed while unemployed And Christine McLucas is also still waiting of course. The eight on your side team will continue to follow the challenges facing unemployment during the next several months. We invite you to continue to share your stories with us stories that we could put on the air for now. Thanks for joining us and good night. Mhm, mm hmm, mm hmm