The DWD/unemployment budget, Round 2

Tax breaks for employers

I previously described how the Joint Finance Committee ignored reality and state unemployment law — particularly the state’s partial wage formula that encourages people to work part-time while STILL being eligible for and collecting unemployment benefits — to make false claims about unemployment benefits keeping people from working.

This effort is being done in the name of stigmatizing unemployment benefits. This push to end the pandemic relief programs early is still utter nonsense.

What is lost in this hubbub is the essential nature of unemployment benefits in the first place. Unemployment is an insurance system. Just like car insurance is there when there is an car accident, unemployment is supposed to be there when there is a job loss. Period. Under Wisconsin unemployment law, eligibility is presumed (at least that is what is supposed to happen).

We need to start thinking that unemployment is what it is — insurance — that must be paid out immediately whenever there is a no-fault job loss. As Wisconsin law explains:

Whether or not a given employing unit can provide steadier work and wages for its own employees, it can reasonably be required to build up a limited reserve for unemployment, out of which benefits shall be paid to its eligible unemployed workers, as a matter of right, based on their respective wages and lengths of service.

Wis. Stat. § 108.01(1) (emphasis supplied).

Despite how unemployment is designed to assist claimants and tax employers for those benefits based on each employer’s specific job loss experience, it seems the only action at reform for the moment is to help employers out.

At the June 17th meeting of the Unemployment Insurance Advisory Council, the Department introduced an emergency rule to finally get pandemic-related experience waiver right, at least on a temporary basis. Unlike in other states where any and all 2020 job losses were presumed to be pandemic-related and so not chargeable to employers, Wisconsin at first presumed all job losses were NOT pandemic-related unless an employer provided specific evidence and a form about the pandemic-nature of that job loss. Furthermore, the period for this pandemic-related waiver originally expired on 16 May 2020.

Then, after further orders and passage of 2021 Wis. Act 4, the time period for possible waiver of initial claims on employer experience-rating was extended to those claims filed before 13 March 2021. But, in general forms and reasons still need to be submitted by employers to take advantage of having any unemployment claims against their UI tax account waived because of the pandemic.

With this new rule, the Department is finally waking up to the idea that an automatic, blanket waiver for employer pandemic-related charges is more efficient and easier to administer than a case-by-case, employer-by-employer waiver application (something other states realized back in March and April of 2020). Now, more than a year after the pandemic started and several prior emergency rules:

This rule provides that the Department, in calculating an employer’s net reserve as of the June 30, 2021 computation date, shall disregard all benefit charges and benefit adjustments for the period of March 15, 2020 through March 13, 2021.

New rule at 2 (emphasis supplied). But, the Department is NOT actually forgiving these pandemic job losses on a permanent basis in light of a pandemic for which employers had no control of ability to affect. Unlike other states that sought to make the administrative burden for employers and employees easier in face of the pandemic and the ensuing massive job losses, Wisconsin is still only delaying this experience-rating. Individual and employer-based charging based on job losses in 2020 will be implemented for 2023.

The Department will, in effect, assume that all benefit charges and adjustments were related to the public health emergency declared by Executive Order 72. This assumption applies only for the purposes of setting the contribution rates for 2022. This rule will ensure that employers’ contribution rates for 2022 are calculated based on reserve fund balances as of June 30, 2021 without taking charges related to the public health emergency into account so that the policy goals of 2019 Wisconsin Act 185 and 2021 Wisconsin Act 4 are met. This rule will only affect calculation of contribution rates for 2022. Contribution rates for 2023 will be calculated in 2022 after all recharging is complete.

New rule at 3. In short, this new rule is only a delaying action for a massive administrative headache for everyone.

Note: Reimbursable employers are not being forgotten either. The Department also announced at the June 17th meeting that it was going to ask for an additional extension of the charging waiver for reimbursable employers.

Not to be outdone when thinking of employers, the Joint Finance Committee has also stepped into this game with a $60 million per year transfer from general tax revenue to the unemployment trust fund for the next two years. See item 9 of Motion 2001 that was approved on June 17th and LRB-4069, scheduled for public hearing on June 23rd. The goal here is to keep the tax rate for employers at Schedule D — the lowest unemployment tax rate schedule — for these next two years.

This concern for employer tax rates when an economic recovery is underway is economically idiotic. As of December 2020, Wisconsin had one of the higher trust fund balances in the nation. See also the table in State Unemployment Insurance Trust Fund Solvency Report 2021, US Dep’t of Labor, Office of Unemployment Insurance, Division of Fiscal and Actuarial Services (March 2021) at 59. Wisconsin continues to pay out unemployment benefits at much lower than expected levels, yet the concern continues to be on keeping unemployment taxes at their already lowest levels.

Note: this employer tax proposal is occurring because Republicans are proclaiming employers are still hurting and cannot afford any increase in unemployment taxes at the same time these same Republicans are proclaiming an economic recovery is being held back because “jobless workers” are refusing to go back to work and make the recovery even better. In other words, the economic picture radically changes according to the policy goal being pushed.

As I said in January 2021, maintaining a positive balance in the trust fund during times of massive job loss is economic waste. Governments need to spend money during times of recession and then raise taxes during times of economic recovery (which seems to be now and next year).

$1.1 billion is the amount available in the unemployment trust fund at the end of December 2020. $1.1 billion that is not helping anyone but just sitting in a bank account.

Wis. Stat. § 108.01(1) (emphasis supplied) provides:

Unemployment in Wisconsin is recognized as an urgent public problem, gravely affecting the health, morals and welfare of the people of this state. The burdens resulting from irregular employment and reduced annual earnings fall directly on the unemployed worker and his or her family. The decreased and irregular purchasing power of wage earners in turn vitally affects the livelihood of farmers, merchants and manufacturers, results in a decreased demand for their products, and thus tends partially to paralyze the economic life of the entire state. In good times and in bad times unemployment is a heavy social cost, directly affecting many thousands of wage earners. Each employing unit in Wisconsin should pay at least a part of this social cost, connected with its own irregular operations, by financing benefits for its own unemployed workers. Each employer’s contribution rate should vary in accordance with its own unemployment costs, as shown by experience under this chapter.

So, money to pay rent and groceries, to dine out in restaurants, just to spend on consumer goods — WHEN there is a state-wide lack of consumer spending because of a worldwide pandemic — is not going out to the unemployed workers in this state who need it.

That statement is still true today. Sigh.