State lawmakers grilled top Employment Development Department officials during a tense legislative hearing Wednesday, seeking solutions to the agency’s repeated failures and blunders in paying jobless workers.
An oversight hearing of the Joint Legislative Audit Committee and the Assembly Insurance Committee undertook a wide-ranging review of the EDD’s broken call center, hobbled computer system, a backlog of unemployment payments, failures to pay legitimate claims for unemployed workers and ongoing fraud problems.
The four-hour hearing was conducted in the wake of two reports from the state auditor that documented an array of deficiencies at the EDD.
“As egregious as the findings of these audits are, they did not come as a surprise,” state Assemblymember Mark Berman (D-Menlo Park) told EDD representatives during the hearing. “For 11 months now, we have been dealing with the consequences of EDD’s negligence.”
The department continues to struggle to pay in a timely fashion all workers who have legitimate unemployment claims as well as weed out claims that are fraudulent, the state auditor determined.
The EDD’s failures to answer phone calls from unemployed workers haven’t measurably improved, lawmakers said.
“The call volumes are not going down, they are going up,” state Assemblymember Jim Patterson (R-Fresno) said.
Assemblymember Mike Gipson (D-Los Angeles), offered the example of a constituent, named Josh, who has been forced to give up residing in his home.
“Josh is sleeping in his car, he has no job, people are passing by giving him money just to help ends meet,” Gipson said. “He is not getting any help from the entity that is supposed to be supporting him. There is no excuse. We are in a crisis. The people of California are pissed off and so are we.”
EDD Director Rita Saenz vowed to fix the problems at the state agency.
“It is our intention to accelerate the modernization of the department,” Saenz told the legislative panel. “We have a blueprint for how to move forward.”
But state Auditor Elaine Howle warned that the bureaucratic gears of the EDD might be too ossified to crank swiftly to address the numerous problems at the state agency.
“This is an agency that is kind of embedded in bureaucracy and old processes,” she said. “We need to be more creative.”
Source: Orange County Register
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