State Working To Handle Over 1,000,000 Unemployment Claims

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unemployment-37

Over a million in Michigan have filed for unemployment, an unprecedented number that strangled the state’s unemployment claims system and caused to crash for hours on Monday. Aside from adding more servers and call centers, Michigan Department of Labor and Economic Opportunity director Jeff Donofrio says the system has to become more consistent with those in other states.

“It would be a great thing to have a national system,” says Donofrio. “There’s a standard, potentially, of an upgrade to quality apps that could be downloaded on phones. Each system now is state-by-state, and there’s not a lot of resources out there to modernize it.”

Unemployment Insurance Agency Director Steve Gray says they are dealing with a situation they have never seen, even after they upgraded the system late last year.

“We have so many new claimants who have never claimed (unemployment) before, and the cracks in our user interface, the areas that raise questions that maybe we hadn’t seen before, are coming to the surface,” says Gray.

Donofrio says the federal requirements need to be streamlined in order to make the process go faster, given the high number of unemployed who need their benefits quickly. Unemployment payments are expected to start going out in the next few weeks.