Misti Diamond has hated leaving her Norridgewock apartment this summer because she knows if she does her landlord will appear and ask if her unemployment benefit payments, more than 22 weeks late, have arrived yet. She will have to tell him no and explain she still can’t pay him rent.
“It’s embarrassing and humiliating,” said Diamond, 48. “I don’t know what to do anymore. I’m at a loss.”
So, apparently, are the Maine Department of Labor representatives Diamond has spoken to in what she estimates are dozens of phone calls. Nothing is wrong with her claim, the department has told her. Instead, “‘You’re stuck in a loop,’ or ‘Your claim is stuck,’ or ‘The problem is a glitch,’” Diamond said.
That explanation, that unemployment claims are somehow “stuck” in the computer system that handles them, is a familiar one to many Maine people who have reported waiting months for the benefits owed to them.
What they might not know is that the leaders of an interstate group responsible for the computer system were frustrated with the company behind the technology last year, saying they couldn’t rely on it “to provide a quality system.”
What’s more, those leaders have not met since the pandemic began, raising questions about the group’s involvement in troubleshooting problems during the country’s greatest economic downturn since the Great Depression.
Just as people like Diamond have tried to understand why their benefits are delayed, the Bangor Daily News also inquired about the underlying reasons. The Maine Department of Labor declined to comment on why specific claimants were experiencing longer wait times, but said “the most complex, unique cases take longer to process.”
At least one lawmaker believes the problems distributing unemployment benefits stem from faulty software developed by the ReEmployUSA consortium, a multi-state pact formed to share the cost of creating and maintaining state unemployment insurance systems.
Five states — Connecticut, Oklahoma, Mississippi, Maine and Rhode Island — belong to the consortium, but only Maine and Mississippi have fully implemented the consortium’s software platform. In Maine, it’s called ReEmployME.
“There seem to be some persistent and intractable problems with the ReEmployME system, which is resulting in hundreds of Mainers, maybe more, whose cases are stalled for no apparent reason,” said Sen. Shenna Bellows, D-Manchester, who chairs the legislative committee overseeing the unemployment system. “Certainly the system is better than what was in place a decade ago. But it is deeply flawed.”
Her concerns are bolstered by data showing that both Maine and Mississippi are distributing benefits the slowest of all 50 states. While Maine was among the states that distributed benefits the fastest in the early stages of the pandemic, it has since fallen to the bottom of the list.
Unemployment experts and lawmakers did not know enough about the multi-state consortium, arranged under the LePage administration, to say what impact, if any, it had or could have on Maine’s response to the pandemic. The labor department declined to make Maine’s representative to the consortium available for an interview and declined a request to interview the state’s labor commissioner. Mississippi’s consortium member did not respond to questions.
But the states do share information and expertise, and can help one another analyze technological challenges. The consortium, made up of representatives from state agencies that administer unemployment insurance benefits, allows members to “collectively develop, support, and maintain a system to administer the unemployment insurance benefits and tax systems,” according to a 2019 memorandum of understanding.
They have worked together in the past. For instance, Mississippi shared technology that Maine used to help launch the state’s federal Pandemic Unemployment Assistance program, according to the Maine Department of Labor. About 70 percent of the larger software system is shared, with the other 30 percent state-specific, according to the department.
At the top level, however, there appears to have been little collaboration in recent months. The executive committee of the ReEmployUSA consortium, made up of people from each member state and the consortium’s software vendor, Mumbai-based Tata Consultancy Services, has not met — whether by Zoom or phone or otherwise — since the pandemic began, according to the labor department.
The executive committee has also not been emailing about the potential software…
Read More: People are still stuck in Maine’s unemployment ‘vortex,’ while multi-state