COVID-19 unemployment fails? Blame obsolete state work technology

The coronavirus crisis has clearly shown that the United States gets an “F” for disaster preparedness. Vital systems in our great country are crumbling under pressure: the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention viral testing fiasco has cut health workers’ legs, and Coronavirus Aid’s Small Business Loans program, Relief, and Economic Security Act collapsed as banks struggled to meet demand.

Oh, and state labor departments are blazing with record numbers of jobless claims, thanks to tech systems that are sadly out of date. It shouldn’t have been like that, but alas, it is.

Here are some examples:

• New York: New York’s unemployment insurance system runs on archaic software that, according to state officials, “was written in the 1970s and 1980s and remains limited by technology of that time.” reports the New York Times. But this is not news; it is a known problem that the state sought to resolve in 2017. In 2019, it awarded a $ 56 million, five-year contract to Tata Consultancy Services, based in Mumbai, to modernize its “outdated and expensive” system. But these fixes weren’t made fast enough: more than 450,000 New Yorkers who tried to file unemployment claims in the past three weeks, they encountered frozen computer screens and pop-ups recommending Netscape, a web browser that was discontinued in 2008. An applicant Told the New york times that he had to go to Staples, in the middle of the pandemic, to be able to fax his pay stubs to the Albany offices of the labor department.
• New Jersey: The unemployment insurance system in New Jersey is just as primitive as that in New York, working with COBOL (Common Business-Oriented Language) software, a relic of the age of mainframe computers. COBOL peaked in the 1960s before sinking into near extinction, despite a brief renaissance during the Y2K crisis. Not surprisingly, New Jersey’s four-decade-old technology has not been able to to handle the 1,600% rise in state claims, and Governor Phil Murphy at a press conference on Sunday pleaded for help from volunteer coders who might know how to work at COBOL, most of whom would be retirees.
• Maine: The Maine Department of Labor was also unable to cope with the spike in claims. Unemployed claimants who have encountered technical problems with the website should call the offices, which were overwhelmed by an “unprecedented number” of calls, according to Maine Public. In response, the department reverted to the good old alphabet system: tax filers whose last name begins with AH can call Monday, IQ Tuesday, and RZ Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday for leftovers that missed the designated day.
• Florida: Florida unemployment website has been down for years, hosting long-standing problems reported by listeners in three reports in the past five years, the last in 2019. Neither the former nor the state governor Current have only addressed these issues, although the director of the Florida Department of Economic Opportunities last week, Ken Lawson told reporters who were trying to navigate the website: “With all my heart, I apologize for this that you live. ” According to to the Miami herald, Lawson said its offices had received 1.5 million calls the previous week, with one-third of those registrants trying to reset their PINs, which are required to connect to the website. In the meantime, the department is offering paper requests to be mailed to offices, where a hired third party will scan them into the system.

And these states are not alone: ​​In 2018 review on 400 state government websites of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation found that almost all lack essential criteria, including page load speed, mobile usability, security, and accessibility.

For a country that leads global innovation and technological development, you think we can do a little better than that. Hopefully this will serve as a wake-up call for the future.