For thousands in NC denied unemployment, the wait on an appeal can take months
People across North Carolina have gone months without unemployment checks while waiting for the state to consider their appeals of denied benefits.
Janita Watkins hasn’t received an unemployment check since Oct. 19.
When the pandemic started, she had already lost her customer service job at a cosmetics company. She’d been applying for jobs, but when the first COVID-19 cases appeared in North Carolina in March, hiring stopped.
At that point, she couldn’t go to work anyway. She has to stay home with her three children while they attend school online. Plus, Watkins and two of her children have asthma, putting the Greensboro family at high risk for complications from COVID-19.
By June, her portal on the Division of Employment Security website showed she had exhausted her state benefits. The system prompted her to apply for Pandemic Unemployment Assistance, which the federal CARES Act created to help people ineligible for state benefits. Among others, it covers primary caregivers for children unable to attend school due to COVID-19.
But on June 9, Watkins received a notice that she wasn’t eligible for PUA because her ability to work “has not been adversely affected as a direct result” of COVID-19. She appealed, and spent nearly two months calling and emailing DES, often sitting on hold for hours. Finally, in August, she received a hearing date: October 7.
“The situation of the waiting game with unemployment piqued my anxiety to a level that I had yet to see,” Watkins said. “It just makes it difficult as a parent when you’re not getting the resource help that you’ve paid and worked into. You can’t get any concise answers as to why things are going this way.”
Watkins’ appeal is one of over 62,000 filed over unemployment claims between Apr. 1, 2020, and Jan. 7 according to the Division of Employment Security. Over 40% of those — 26,687 — have yet to be heard, and over 24,000 have yet to be scheduled.
Before the pandemic, an appeal of denied benefits like Watkins’ would likely have been heard within 20 days, according to DES.
But now, the surge in unemployment claims has overwhelmed the agency. The average time between when a person files an appeal and receives notification of a hearing date is anywhere from two and a half to five and a half months, DES spokesperson Kerry McComber said. Then, claimants have to wait another two to three weeks on average for the hearing itself.
“Every claim is important, and our team is focused on helping all claimants receive the assistance they are eligible for within the law,” Assistant Secretary of DES Pryor Gibson told The News & Observer in a statement. “Throughout the process, claimants are given multiple opportunities to challenge eligibility rulings and present additional information that can overturn an initial decision.”
NC wait times exceed national average
The wait times in North Carolina are far higher than the nationwide average.
In November, one-third of cases took four to six months to be decided compared to the national rate of about one in five, according to data from the U.S. Department of Labor. Just 6.7% of cases in North Carolina were decided within 25 days, compared with 14.4% nationwide. According to federal guidance, appeals decisions should be made within 30 days of filing.
In Watkins’ case, the wait has stretched even longer. On her October hearing date, the DES appeals officer called a cell phone number of Watkins’ that had been disconnected due to nonpayment over the summer. The agent didn’t try calling the new number that she said she had updated in the system.
The hearing was rescheduled for a month and a half later: Nov. 24. Watkins thought it went well. She told the appeals officer about her and her children’s asthma and how she needed to stay home with them.
But less than a week later, she was notified her appeal had been denied. Because her employment had ended before schools closed due to COVID-19, the decision stated, her lack of work was not “caused by COVID-19.”
She appealed again in the second week of December, but hasn’t received a date for her next hearing. DES declined to comment on Watkins’ case, but the day after The N&O sought comment, the agency remanded her appeal to a higher appeals authority for further review.
In the meantime, Watkins has been struggling, relying on state rental assistance through the HOPE program and $400 monthly child support checks.
“I just feel like North Carolina failed all its citizens,” said Watkins. She moved to North Carolina from California in 2019 when her job relocated her, a decision she now regrets. “If I had known then what I know now, I would have just stayed put in the first place.”
Hundreds of thousands of claims denied
The appeals system has been overwhelmed by people contesting denied benefits.
Since March 15, 2020, over 430,000 people have been denied benefits in North Carolina — nearly 1 in 3 people who’ve applied for unemployment.
Experts attribute the large volume of denials in North Carolina at least partly to changes to the state’s unemployment system that predate the pandemic.
In 2013, the Republican-led legislature tightened eligibility for benefits, disqualifying people who leave work for health or family-related reasons or who refuse to take low-wage work after 10 weeks.
“There was definitely a conscious legislative effort to make it as difficult as possible to qualify for and receive unemployment insurance in North Carolina,” said George Wentworth, senior counsel with the National Employment Law Project who previously managed unemployment insurance for the state of Connecticut.
Rep. Julia Howard, a 16-term Republican from Davie County who helped design the 2013 bill, said the purpose was to shrink the state’s federal debt and make eligibility requirements clearer.
“Prior to ‘13 it was very loose and very gray — a lot of gray areas where it was subjective of people getting benefits or not,” Howard, who co-chairs the joint committee on unemployment insurance, told The N&O. “The only thing we did is make it very clear that it’s either black or white. The rules are the rules.”
At the end of 2019, fewer than 1 in 10 unemployed people actively seeking work in North Carolina received unemployment benefits, the lowest rate in the country, according to data from the U.S. Department of Labor.
The effects of the state’s strict eligibility requirements have become more pronounced during the pandemic.
“Some folks, while they may be technically capable of working and their employers have turned their lights back on, they don’t feel safe doing so,” said state Rep. Vernetta Alston, a Durham Democrat. She proposed a bill in the last legislative session that would expand eligibility requirements, as well as benefit weeks and amounts. She and other Democrats plan to propose a similar bill in the upcoming legislative session.
Howard said when Republicans designed the eligibility requirements, “We didn’t expect a virus or a COVID or anything like this.”
But she added: “There are going to be people that are going to say ‘I’m afraid to go because ... ’ — You know, I’m working, I’ve got the mask, I’ll take the vaccine as soon as it’s available, but would it be easier for me to stay at home and draw unemployment? Probably. But I’m not going to do that.”
Wentworth also said the state’s “notoriously difficult to navigate” automated system causes workers to be deemed ineligible for benefits because of mistakes in filing certifications.
Experts also say unemployment agencies have been acting conservatively when approving or denying benefits as federal guidance has consistently sounded the alarm about fraudulent claims. The U.S. Department of Labor measures the accuracy with which states administer benefits, and states that fall below performance standards can be penalized.
“How that gets translated to the state agents is ‘I’m just going to deny people because I don’t want to commit fraud,’” said Andrew Stettner, a senior fellow at The Century Foundation. That may be especially true for the hundreds of new agents hired just in recent months to meet the surge in claims, he said.
As a result, many claimants have been wrongfully denied benefits. Of the nearly 30,000 appeals heard in North Carolina from the start of the pandemic through mid-December, over 6,000 were decided in the claimants’ favor.
Nationwide surge in appeals
A similar process of denials and appeals has unfolded across the country. Over 700,000 appeals are pending nationwide, according to an analysis by The Washington Post.
As unemployment agencies have made it through the backlog of claims in recent months, the number of appeals has surged: nationwide, the number of appeals cases nearly doubled from just over 200,000 in June to just over 400,000 in November. In North Carolina, appeals cases doubled from fewer than 12,000 in June to nearly 25,000 in November, according to data from the U.S. Department of Labor.
But in North Carolina, the unemployment system was especially unprepared. At the same time the Republican-led legislature narrowed eligibility, it eliminated all state funding for administration of state unemployment benefits, leaving the system entirely dependent on declining federal funds.
Sen. Chuck Edwards, a Henderson Republican who co-chairs the legislative oversight committee on unemployment insurance, contested that inadequate funding was to blame for the appeals backlog.
“It seems like a stretch to explain away the Cooper Administration’s unemployment assistance debacle by pointing to something the legislature did seven years prior,” Edwards said in an email, blaming the large number of appeals on the large number of claims.
He cited a May 2020 hearing in which then-DES Assistant Secretary Lockhart Taylor said his department had adequate resources.
However, according to a recording of the hearing, Taylor did not get to fully address that question. When Edwards asked whether funding is “one of the obstacles right now,” Taylor replied “No sir—”at which point Edwards quickly cut him off mid-sentence: “Thank you.”
In response to a question about staffing needs, Taylor said at the hearing he did not yet know whether the current staffing level would be adequate.
Taylor was moved from his position to a different position at the Commerce Department within the month.
Under Gibson’s leadership DES has taken major steps to staff up. Since the start of the pandemic, the agency has quadrupled its staff of appeals referees, said McComber.
That has allowed the state to go from hearing approximately 2,100 appeals a month to 8,900 a month, and McComber said “wait times will continue to improve as new employees are fully trained and gain more experience.”
Long wait for benefits leaves many struggling
For many jobless North Carolinians, even just a few weeks wait for benefits can mean the difference between being able to stay housed and put food on the table, or not.
At the end of March, Tameika Aiken developed a severe cough. She was used to that; she has a condition called sarcoidosis that makes it hard for her to breathe. But this time was different.
She was diagnosed with COVID-19 and put on medical leave from her job at a customer service call center. At the same time, the company began reducing hours as call volumes dropped. In May, she was laid off.
Aiken applied for state unemployment and received $211 a week, along with the extra $600 weekly federal benefit for the first couple of months. But once that ran out in July, she couldn’t afford the rent for the Greensboro apartment she shared with her two kids. They got an eviction notice. She put her belongings in storage, moved into a small hotel room with her boyfriend, and sent her kids to live with her mother.
Then, in November, she stopped receiving unemployment altogether. After exhausting state benefits programs and extensions, she got a notice that she’d been denied federal PUA benefits because she wasn’t out of work for COVID-19 related reasons.
Aiken appealed with a doctor’s note saying she shouldn’t work. Weeks went by without an update. She scanned Facebook groups where unemployed people in North Carolina share advice and found email addresses for dozens of DES officials and emailed each one for help. Finally she received a hearing date: Dec. 31.
Aiken spent the next two weeks preparing for the interview, getting her documents organized and watching YouTube videos about what to say.
“I feel like I went to law school,” she said.
Meanwhile, she and her boyfriend were “basically starving,” Aiken said, trying to make one meal last for days. She receives food stamps, but gives most of them to her mother for her kids. “It’s a lot of sacrifice,” she said.
A week after the hearing, Aiken got the good news: she’d been approved. She received back paid benefits the next day. With money for a deposit, she began applying for apartments immediately.
The hearing determination didn’t explain the reversal, but Aiken said the appeals officer told her it looked like a “system error.” DES declined to comment on the case.
“It hurts my feelings that I had to suffer because of a ‘system error,’” Aiken said. “It wasn’t just a system error. It was no communication, and nobody would help me.”
This story was originally published January 13, 2021 at 10:12 AM with the headline "For thousands in NC denied unemployment, the wait on an appeal can take months."
