SALEM, Ore. — Late last month, committees from both the Oregon House and Senate brought in leaders from the Oregon Employment Department to hear about the agency's ongoing issues with backlogged paid leave and unemployment claims.
It's a problem that OED says predates the rollout of a new computer system, Frances Online, which replaced the archaic system it had used for decades prior.
Regardless, the issues seem to have come to a head since the beginning of this year, with Oregonians continuing to report issues receiving their benefits and incredible headaches in trying to reach someone at OED on the phone to resolve those issues.
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Lawmakers asked OED officials to come in and explain the problems because, as Sen. Deb Patterson from the Committee on Labor and Business said, it's an issue some of them have heard about from constituents more than any other. She related the experience of someone who needed to take medical leave and had called hundreds of times to check on her claim.
"On all but one of those calls, that person received a busy signal," Patterson said. "The last call gave them an estimated wait time of 7 hours and 18 minutes. So they put it on speaker phone — and when 15 minutes was left of their wait time, the call was disconnected."
OED Director David Gerstenfeld told lawmakers what his agency has been telling media and the public for months; that their staffing levels are too low due to underfunding at the federal level and the end of pandemic-era funding.
Frances Online, the department says, is a much more updated and streamlined software than what they had before, and eventually it will help people get through the system faster. But the issues with staffing are preventing that from happening.
"Between April of 2023 and February of 2024, which was right before we went live with our new unemployment technology, the percentage of people that we were able to get their first benefits within three weeks — that federal benchmark — went from about 92% to about 65%," Gerstenfeld said. "So that predated the switch to the new technology, and was because we had only one third as many employees to do the work."
In order to catch up on the backlog, OED rolled out a plan to cut phone hours, taking no new calls at all on Mondays or after 4 p.m. on other weekdays. But lawmakers in the Oregon House hearing were not convinced.
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"I appreciate your comment about trying to catch up on everything, but for all the folks that can't get through the Frances system on Sunday, they're calling us now," said Rep. Vikki Breese-Iverson. "So thanks for sharing, but I think the reality is that your 17,000 phone calls that you get in a day, we're now getting some of those, which we put more pressure on your agency to try to help our constituents. So I'm trying to understand why Monday would be the right day to be closed."
Gerstenfeld said the agency's data shows that they get more calls mid-week than on Mondays. He's hoping the change will give employees Mondays to solve claim issues so that fewer people need to call later in the week, reducing the problem overall.
Most people, he said, are calling to check on the status of their claim. OED hopes to resolve the issues before people need to call again.
Rep. Anna Scharf from the House Committee on Labor and Workplace Standards wanted to know why the Frances Online system couldn't be used to give people better updates in real time.
"I'm really struggling with, why is my office flooded with calls? Thank you for keeping my staff busy — she always needs something more to do. Sorry Abby," Scharf said dryly. "And then I'm struggling with the inabilities of Frances to actually- we must've bought a mediocre software program because I can buy a Dominos pizza on my phone and I can watch them putting the toppings on it and know exactly when it's going to hit my door. So I can't figure out why Frances can't allow tech savvy applicants to log in and look and say, 'Oh, they're putting pepperoni on my claim, it'll be here on Wednesday at 3 o'clock.' Frances is a failure in that respect, to me, which is a failure on the software company that provided it to you."
Gerstenfeld explained that people can send messages to OED through Frances Online, but sending multiple messages on the same topic can slow everything down, just like making multiple phone calls, because staff members have to go in and clear each one.
But according to Gerstenfeld, there's a light at the end of the tunnel. The Oregon Legislature previously passed a bill approving new funding for OED to increase staffing levels. They've already begun hiring. It will take some time to train up workers and get them processing claims, but he expected that will happen by the end of summer.
Lawmakers are hoping to see some change by then, and they've called Gerstenfeld and other leaders from OED to come back and deliver an update in September.