Legislature pushes a bunch of no-reform unemployment proposals

Update 11 July 2023: Jacob Resnick of Wisconsin Watch has done some digging on the billionaire lobbying groups pushing these no-reform proposals. One of the key quotations from the article:

“One of the fastest ways that we can deal with Wisconsin’s ongoing workforce shortage is to keep people who are still in the labor market, those recently unemployed, productively engaged in the workforce,” Gibbs told members of the Assembly Committee on Workforce Development and Economic Opportunities.

The problem that this billionaires’ lobbyist fails to acknowledge, as noted below, is that unemployment has nothing to do with any worker shortage.

Update 17 April 2023: I testified at the committee hearing on April 12th for most of these bills. For some unknown reason, my written testimony has not been included in the committee materials for any of the bills.

Updated 12 April 2023 (added links to various policy briefs from NELP and a quotation from the 2023 fraud report).

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With the April 2023 election, an incredibly general, state-wide advisory ballot question about people on welfare needing to work passed by wide margins.

The Wisconsin legislature has taken that passage as a message to suddenly revamp and fine tune unemployment eligibility without actually fixing any of the problems with unemployment claim-filing in this state.

First some background.

It is vital to know that unemployment claim-filing is now in 2023 much, much different from what used to occur.

Year    Claimants Paid Benefits     Initial Claims
2007    332,982                     638,548
2008    386,574                     736,245
2009    566,353                   1,125,127
2010    530,886                     826,872
2011    445,538                     722,018
2012    366,829                     613,667
2013    312,325                     550,050
2014    233,129                     488,472
2015    197,070                     423,858
2016    168,006                     385,405
2017    144,727                     305,813
2018    130,710                     279,912
2019    129,888                     287,043
2020    603,459                   1,202,700
2021    295,249                     529,476
2022    116,302                     263,248

As this data reveals, claim-filing in Wisconsin had plummeted just before the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020. In 2018, there was a record low of initial claims filed by individuals, and in 2019 there was a record low in the number of people who were paid unemployment benefits in Wisconsin.

Compare these numbers with what existed in 2007, a “normal” economic year when initial claims and weekly certifications were around 10 questions each and could be filed via a phone call. In that year, there were 638,548 initial claims, and 332,982 claimants were paid benefits that year (more than one out of every ten workers received unemployment benefits that year).

Obviously, the Covid-19 pandemic reversed that trend. But, that reversal was incredibly short-lived. In 2022, new record lows for claimants paid benefits and for initial claims filed in the state were set. Initial claims in 2022 were roughly 89% of the number of initial claims filed in 2019, and paid claimants in 2022 were under 90% of 2019 levels. And, this trend of ever declining unemployment has continued into 2023. As of week 13 of 2023, initial claims are running at around 84% of 2022 levels. So, 2023 is likely going to set still another record low for initial claims and in benefits paid to claimants.

At the same time that unemployment claim-filing has declined and declined and then declined some more, the labor force in Wisconsin has been relatively stagnant and unchanging throughout this time period.

In 2007, there were 2,732,290 workers in Wisconsin, and in 2022 there were 2,754,514 workers, an increase of only 22,224 after 15 years.

So, unemployment has become less and less an issue for Wisconsin workers. The data right now indicates that the vast majority of claims are filed in the winter months, when scores of businesses like landscaping, road building, some construction, and others cannot operate because of winter conditions.

Into this picture of unemployment claim-filing comes the state legislature now with a bunch of sticks to beat over the head of the few people still seeking unemployment benefits. Here is a rundown of these proposals.

AB147

This bill provides new ways to disqualify claimants for misconduct for:

• any damage to employers’ property and records done unintentionally, by accident,
• possible violations of employers’ social media policies, and
• violations of employers’ absenteeism policies pursuant to Beres.

This expansion of Beres and accidental damage raise a serious risk of Wisconsin employers losing their FUTA tax exemption, because the misconduct penalty of lost wages in a benefit year can only be applied to intentional employee conduct.

As noted by the Commission in its briefing in Beres, this employer-determined misconduct for non-intentional absences (in both Beres and Stangel, the employees were absent because of illnesses over which they had no control) ran the risk of Wisconsin being found by the US Department of Labor to no longer be in compliance with federal requirements for unemployment. That lack of compliance could well lead to Wisconsin employers losing a tax credit and seeing their federal unemployment taxes jumping from a 0.5% to 7.0% tax rate — quite a jump.

As to the social media violation, this proposed change is basically incomprehensible. As written, this proposed statute makes any social media violation by an employee into misconduct. Accordingly, any employer discharge for a social media policy can now subject an employee to a misconduct disqualification. Hence, this provision is also likely to put state employers at risk of losing their FUTA tax exemption.

AB147 also mandates that employees with combined wage claims (also called interstate claims) who live outside of Wisconsin must register with the job center in their state. The problems with this proposed change are two-fold. First, the Department already requires claimants to do this registration. Second, this requirement ignores the fact that not all states and territories have job registration systems. Indeed, Minnesota, just next door, has no such requirement or system. As a result, Wisconsin is requiring claimants to do something that cannot actually be done in a state that lacks a job center like Wisconsin’s.

AB147 continues with still more nonsense. At present, the Department audits about 10% of all work searches. This proposal wants to increase the number of work searches being audited to 50%. As a result, it would either require the Department to quintuple its workforce or force current employees to do nothing but work search auditing.

Finally, in a pique over the PUA and MEUC benefits and supplemental PUC benefits that were made available during the pandemic, the legislature wants the Joint Committee on Finance to have a voice in whether similar funds and benefits become available in the state in the future. As evident here, the legislators simply fail to understand that Wisconsin has a partial wage formula that encourages people to work while claiming unemployment benefits. Indeed, raising the benefit levels and removing the current $500 cap would probably lead to more people working while collecting unemployment, not less. Apparently, basic economics is not needed for unemployment legislation.

AB149

• Requires the Department to allow employers to report people who do not show up for interviews, who declines a job interview, who miss an interview, who miss work, or who fail to return to a job after being recalled. The Department, however, already encourages employers to report this information. See, e.g., Refused Work, Work Available with Current Employer, and Report Unemployment Fraud. All of these employee actions would also lead to a loss of benefits, IF the person was claiming benefits at the time.

So, this portion of the bill changes nothing that it purports to do. Claimants who fail to attend a job interview for reasons that do not relate to illness or finding another job are likely to be found ineligible for benefits and perhaps even guilty of fraud/concealment. Indeed, this proposal actually makes claim-filing less onerous by allowing a person to have one such report as NOT counting against their eligibility (when right now, all such reports are investigated and ineligibility found if the claimant lacks the required legal justification).

Furthermore, this proposal ignores the fact that claimants are already doing four job searches a week in an economic climate where employers are desperate for finding employees to hire. Accordingly, employees may well find new jobs and skip interviews or offers to return to jobs after finding new jobs that pay more. And, as shown already, in 2022 and 2023, claim-filing is at record lows. In short, this proposal pretends that the labor supply is growing and that there are numerous unemployed people looking for jobs while claiming unemployment benefits, when the claim-filing data indicates the exact opposite.

• Require the Department to provide various employer information in its fraud reports and job search information to claimants.

This proposal adds: (a) some mandatory employer-reporting information to future Department Fraud Reports about missed job interviews and the like to the Department, and (b) a requirement to provide claimants with vital work search information that they now have to search for on their own.

As NELP points out, work search requirements have become an incredibly effective mechanism for keeping benefits out of claimants’ hands. Job searches themselves are easy, but the online-only reporting requirements are difficult to satisfy. As the 2023 Fraud Report at 6 reveals:

In 2022, DWD completed 22,012 work search audits. The audits resulted in 9,045 adverse decisions with benefits denied, including when claimants failed to conduct four valid work search actions. An additional 27,404 adverse determinations were issued for failure to answer the work search question or failure to provide required information on the weekly claim before the claim paid.

Nearly 28,000 claimants in 2022 (out of 263,248 initial claims, or one out of every nine claimants) lost out on benefits because they did not supply required job search information in the first place, even before an audit took place. When one out of every nine people fail to finish something, that reporting requirement is, by definition, NOT easy and understandable.

AB150

This bill is a repeat of the re-employment bill from the previous session, and is still misguided, liberal, big government intervention into micro-managing people’s work lives.

AB152

This bill appears to be a Department-sponsored initiative and mandates things already being done by the Department or which the Department would like to do.

• Identity verification — mandates identity verification for claimants (currently based on Wisconsin-issued IDs).
• Mandatory unemployment training for employers that are free to attend and videos for claimants. What should be required here is that the Department again mail out printed copies of the claimants’ handbook rather than just a sheet of paper — a claim confirmation — with a URL for the handbook on it.
• Expanded call center hours whenever there is a declared state of emergency or call volume has increased by 300% from the previous level of a year ago. At present, numerous claimants are reporting to me that 15-20 phone calls a day are all leading to busy signals, so perhaps an increase of 50% should lead to expanded call center hours.
• Mandatory comparison with death records, new hire reporting, and prison records on a weekly basis. The Department already does this cross-match, though delayed by weeks or months.

What should be required is that DWD be mandated to do cross-matches with the quarterly unemployment tax reports the Department receives from employers in April, July, October, and January of each year for all weekly certifications filed during the previous four months (the Department’s current practice is to do a cross match on employer’s quarterly unemployment tax reports from nine to twelve months after the weekly certifications have been filed).

The Department should also be mandated to do cross-matches with employer’s payroll tax withholding reports submitted to the Department of Revenue on a monthly basis. In this way, any over-payments of unemployment benefits would be minimized to a month or less. Moreover, employers would no longer need to submit UCB-23 Wage Verification/Eligibility reports, as the Department would already have this information from the wage/tax withholding reports from the Department of Revenue.

• Unilateral transfer of administrative law judges from other state agencies to DWD for handling unemployment hearings.

Rather than hiring and training attorneys properly, the Department wants to force attorneys who handle environmental regulation cases, discrimination matters, or workers compensation cases into hearing and deciding unemployment cases. What the Department should be focused on is adequate training and hiring, not another kind of quick fix. As I have pointed out elsewhere, the skyrocketing number of denials and over-payments is largely because of inadequate information available to claimants. So, getting claimants educated with concrete, specific advice in place of legalisms so as to avoid all the denials in the first place is what is needed here.

AB153

This proposal seeks to limit the number of weeks of unemployment benefits available according to the state unemployment rate. An unemployment rate of 3.5% or less would mean only 14 possible weeks of unemployment benefits would be available. Only when the unemployment rate was higher than 9% would the full 26 weeks of benefits be available.

This proposal fundamentally misunderstands how unemployment works and why it exists. Unemployment benefits are not something that workers earn. Rather, unemployment is an insurance benefit for maintaining consumer demand for which employers pay a premium, based on their experience rating. As explicitly stated in Wis. Stat. § 108.01 (emphasis supplied):

(1) 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. 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.

(2) The economic burdens resulting from unemployment should not only be shared more fairly, but should also be decreased and prevented as far as possible. A sound system of unemployment reserves, contributions and benefits should induce and reward steady operations by each employer, since the employer is in a better position than any other agency to share in and to reduce the social costs of its own irregular employment. Employers and employees throughout the state should cooperate, in advisory committees under government supervision, to promote and encourage the steadiest possible employment. A more adequate system of free public employment offices should be provided, at the expense of employers, to place workers more efficiently and to shorten the periods between jobs. Education and retraining of workers during their unemployment should be encouraged. Governmental construction providing emergency relief through work and wages should be stimulated.

(3) A gradual and constructive solution of the unemployment problem along these lines has become an imperative public need.

In other words, unemployment is a lot like automobile insurance. The more accidents you have (i.e., more layoffs and claims), the higher your insurance premium. And, just because a driver may have been “accident-free” for some time does not mean the driver should then cut coverage — especially just before the driver hits a busload of school children on the highway. This proposal is essentially pretending that Wisconsin will forever in the future be “accident-free.”

NELP has some excellent information on unemployment financing and why limits on the number of weeks makes no sense and is actually harmful:

Business interests often overlook the vital stabilizing effect UI has on local economies, even though this is also a foundational purpose of the program. UI is an automatic stabilizer: by temporarily replacing some of the lost wages of unemployed workers, it automatically fuels overall economic demand when private spending declines during a national recession or local downturn. Cutting benefit duration reduces this stabilizing function, making layoffs more harmful to the economy.

Claim filing after the pandemic

In late 2022, it is time to see what has happened in Wisconsin with unemployment claim-filing.

Note: The charts presented here are from the Unemployment Insurance Data Explorer, which takes DOL unemployment data obtained from the states and provides a quick way to see what this data means.

Why claims are denied

First, some basic facts need to be introduced. Far too many people think that unemployment claims are approved or denied because of a dispute over a job separation between employee and employer.

That has not been the case since the Great Recession, however. Since before 2014, most initial determinations have denied a claim for reasons that have nothing to do with a job separation reason.

The green line on this chart shows the proportion of initial determination denials that are based on a job separation reason. From 2013 to 2015, roughly 20% of denial reasons were because of a dispute over the job separation. By 2016, that percentage was down to just over 10% and stayed there until the pandemic. Then the percentage climbed steadily to around 30% of all denials. This increase was because the Department examined all lay-offs arising from the pandemic for a prior disqualifying separation within a claimant’s benefit year to find a reason for denying that pandemic-related layoff claim. Yes, even though experience-rating charges were supposed to be waived during the pandemic, the Department still looked for disqualifying reasons from a prior job loss in which to deny eligibility.

So, with the pandemic now over, denials based on separations have declined markedly. With the hot job market, separation reasons are now below 10%.

So, the real story of why claims are denied has nothing to with a dispute between employer and employee over the job separation. The red line showing non-separation reasons is where most denials now happen. In 2013, over 40% of the initial determinations denying a claim were for reasons that had nothing to do with a job separation, and this percentage began climbing steadily due to new job search requirements, the move to on-line only claims-filing for initial claims and weekly certifications, and confusing and legalistic guidance about claim-filing. By 2016 to 2017, that percentage had climbed to 60%, but fell back down to just over 50% by 2018 (with no change in the law, election year anyone?). In 2019, still without any changes in law, the percentage began climbing again and was back at around 60% when the pandemic started. Yikes.

With the pandemic, this percentage declined back down to 2013 levels of just over 40%. In 2021 and 2022, however, there has been a rapid rise in these non-separation denial reasons, and Wisconsin is back at around 60% of all initial determination denying eligibility for non-separation reasons.

So, for many years now, the hurdle for eligibility has had little to do with job separation reasons and much to do with satisfying Department claim-filing requirements.

The true significance of the role of non-separation reasons can be seen in what happens per initial claim.

Note: An initial claim is what a claimant files to report a job loss for which he or she wants to claim unemployment benefits. No benefits are paid, however, based on an initial claim. Claimants must then file weekly certifications (called continuing claims in other states) for each week they want to be paid unemployment benefits. Because initial claims start an unemployment claim, they measure job losses and the claimants affected by those job losses. Weekly certifications, on other hand, only measure the number of people still successfully filing unemployment claims or who are still seeking to file such claims.

Outside of a slight dip in the pandemic and a recent increase in 2022, the green line for separation reasons hardly changed at all. The red line for non-separation reasons, however, began to nearly double in 2015 from 25% to almost 50%. By 2018, this denial rate for initial claims had declined slightly to just over 40%. And, there was a steep decline that began in 2019 just before the pandemic struck, and that steep decline continued into the pandemic, such that in 2020 the denial rate was almost the same as the denial rate for job separations. Since then, however, the denial rate for non-separation reasons for initial claims has sky-rocketed and is nearing 80% by the end of 2022. Together with the separation denial rate for initial claims climbing slightly to 15% at the end of 2022 (a seasonal climb every fall because, you know, winter), nearly 95% of initial claims were being denied at the end of 2022. Wow!

Just what are non-separation reasons

So, separation reasons (misconduct, substantial fault, or quitting a job without good cause) are not why the Department is finding the vast majority of claimants not eligible for unemployment benefits. The real reason the Department is finding claimants not eligible for unemployment benefits has to do with non-separation reasons.

Non-separation reasons usually are reasons directly related to a claimant not satisfying Department-mandated eligibility requirements. Other than an increase in job searches (from two to four in 2011) and the Department-initiated end of winter work search waivers, these mandates have been unchanged legally since before 2010. What has changed significantly is how the Department has implemented these requirements. Here is what has been happening since 2013.

The red (able and available for work), yellow (satisfying job search requirements), and green (other) have gone up and down dramatically over the past ten years.

Since 2016, able and available requirements have led to nearly 30% of all determinations being a denial. This large number of denials is happening because the Department ignores its own legal requirements for determining able and available.

Since 2015, denials because claimants fail to satisfy job search requirements have hovered over 40% and even over 50% except for a rock-like drop at the end of 2021 (discussed below). The job search requirements are leading to all of these denials through a combination of factors, notably the fact that all job searches must be reported on weekly certifications, and that mandated RESEA training and job registration are on-line only, even though the on-line guidance and assistance for accomplishing these goals are meager at best.

Other denial reasons — a catchall category — was at an over 40% denial rate in 2013, but declined steadily to around 15% by 2017 outside of a significant bump to around 25%/30% when the pandemic started. This denial category has been declining since then, however, and is approaching 10% by the end of 2022.

The impact of these changes can truly be seen when looking at these reasons per initial claim.

Both the job search (yellow line) and able and available (red line) plunged when the pandemic started, only to begin steep climbs in 2021. By the end of 2022, able and available reasons were leading to the disqualification of nearly 25% of all initial claims and job search issues were leading to the disqualification of over 45% of initial claims. These two reasons alone account for approximately 65% of all initial claims being denied at the end of 2022.

To understand just what is going on with these numbers, here are Wisconsin’s actual numbers for the second quarters of 2020 (57,466 initial determinations issued) and 2022 (59,564 initial determinations issued).

Update 23 April 2023: Replaced numbers nearly impossible to read with a graphic of those numbers. Click on the numbers to see a larger version.

Thousands of claims were denied at the start of the pandemic because claimants failed to register themselves at the jobcenter website. See “Missed job center registration” at Unemployment delays, part 2. While Wisconsin waived actual job searches, the state did not waive this registration requirement, and so far too many people had their claims denied for this reason. With this data, we now have a number for those denied for failing to register: more than 33,000. Only at the end of 2020 did the Department realize this job registration snafu was its own fault and stopped processing denials for this reason for a short time (until job searches were re-instated). What happened in mid-2020 was an tidal wave of determinations on this one issue of failed job registration.

By the second quarter of 2022, job search requirements and RESEA training were back in place, so job registration is again just one of many ways a claimant can be disqualified. When they complete these requirements, an initial determination finding them eligible as of the date the requirement is completed is issued. Hence, there are thousands of initial determinations now finding claimants eligible after they are originally denied eligibility for a few weeks.

As obvious in this data, a great deal of work and effort by both the Department and claimants is being spent on these requirements because claimants do not understand what is required of them in the first place.

And, as for the able and available disqualifications, in these situations the Department is simply ignoring its own law and applying a disqualification as it understands it — a claimant must be able to work 32 or more hours in a week in order to qualify for unemployment benefits — rather than what the actual requirements pursuant to unemployment law are — a claimant must be able to work as many hours in a week as physically or mentally capable of working, and will be able and available for work even if that number is less than 32 hours in a week. Most claimants in Wisconsin with a disability are being denied eligibility for no legal reason.

Overall, what this data shows is that the vast majority of people in Wisconsin filing unemployment claims today are being denied eligibility, and these denials almost always are based on claimants failing to satisfy Department claim-filing requirements. That is the story of unemployment in Wisconsin.

Advisory Council meeting in August 2021

At the August 17th Advisory Council meeting, there was action on some of the Department proposals.

After coming out of caucus, council members agreed to support Department proposals D21-01 through D21-08, D21-11 (work share modifications), and D21-15 (eliminating unemployment taxes for summer camps and excluding camp counselors who are not students from covered employment).

Full details on D21-11 and D21-15 are available in this previous post.

The support for D21-01 through D21-08 is disappointing, as basic questions remain unanswered about why these proposed changes are needed, including:

• Why are penalties against employers increasing so much in the last four years that the separate fund proposed in D21-01 is now needed?
• Why is the Department in D21-06 re-writing unemployment law to its benefit when it loses key court cases?
• Why the Department in D21-06 is allowing administrative law judges to ignore Commission precedent and unemployment law and regulations without any consequences?
• How will an option to be a fiscal agent in D21-08 actually fix the confusing mess of excluded employment and unemployment taxes that currently exists when a family member cares for another?

In financial news, the unemployment trust fund has $977.5 million as of August 7th.

The Department introduced to council members SB485/AB487, a bill that would exclude uber and lyft drivers from regular unemployment benefits. Strangely, the Department has yet to introduce AB394, a bill that would revamp the over-payment waiver standard to add an equity and good conscience standard to whether an over-payment is affordable or not.

Indeed, there is some interesting data and issues with this latter bill. The Department’s fiscal estimate for AB394 indicates that in the 2018 and 2019 calendar years combined there were only around 350 no-fault over-payments (lack of fault is a precondition for an equity and good conscience waiver). Given that there were 41,197 non-fraud over-payment decisions in 2019 and 44,634 non-fraud over-payment decisions in 2018 (for a combined total of 85,831 non-fraud over-payment decisions, see the 2020 Fraud Report at 9), this number of around 350 is just unbelievable. Less than 0.5% (1 out of every 200 who allegedly made a non-fraudulent mistake) of these cases are without claimant fault?

This conclusion makes even less sense when comparing the number of non-fraud decisions in these years relative to the number of initial claims filed and the number of claimants actually paid unemployment benefits in these years.

                                   2018      2019
Non-fraud cases/Initial Claims    15.95%    14.35%
Non-fraud cases/Claimants paid    34.15%    31.72%

That is, in 2018 and 2019 non-fraud mistakes are around one out of every seven initial claims and one out of every three paid claims. If non-fraudulent mistakes are truly this high (and in years when claim-filing was at an all-time low), then the Department’s guidance to claimants and the claim-filing process are themselves completely broken and inadequate. Claimants are making claim-filing mistakes because the Department is completely inadequate in assisting claimants when they are filing unemployment claims.

But, since the pandemic started there have been no questions or discussion over the claim-filing process at an Advisory Council meeting.

Research results from the Department regarding the labor and management proposals (see this previous description of these proposals) dominated the public portion of the meeting.

Labor’s proposed increase in the weekly benefit rate attracted a great deal of attention from the management side. The Department presented three different scenarios of what the proposed increase would mean, depending on low, medium, and high unemployment — based on the number of weeks of unemployment paid per a typical claim. The management reps, however, want to know an additional variable — what changes in the unemployment rate itself would mean under this proposed weekly benefit rate. The staffer for the Department tried to explain that the three scenarios necessarily implicated a change in unemployment rates (more unemployment claims is correlated with longer periods of unemployment), but the management reps were insistent on seeing numbers directly rated to unemployment rates.

The problem with management representatives’ demand for unemployment rates is that those rates are no longer correlated with the number of unemployment claims filed or paid in Wisconsin. In 2007, the unemployment rate in Wisconsin was 4.8%, but 638,548 initial claims were filed that year and 332,982 of those initial claims (52.15%) were paid.

In 2019, the unemployment rate in Wisconsin was down to 3.3%, roughly 68% of the unemployment rate from 2007. Yet, initial claims in 2019 were down even further to 287,043, and paid claimants were down still more to 129,888. Those 2019 numbers are 45% and 39% of comparable 2007 numbers. In other words, claim-filing has declined to such an extent that it no longer has an historical connection to unemployment rates.

One tidbit in the Department’s research response that went without comment was the disclosure that 2,167 claimants in a typical year win approval of benefits under the 30-day quit to try a new job provision. Since 130,710 claimants were paid unemployment benefits in 2018, this 2,167 figure means that roughly 1 out of every 100 claimants received their unemployment benefits because of this quit exception.

Note: In its research response, the Department reports that 3,425 claimants received unemployment benefits in 2019 under the 30-day quit provision, but that this number was higher than expected because the number of claims being filed increased that year. The number of initial claims in 2019 was up slightly to 287,043 from 279,912 in 2018, hardly a major increase. Moreover, the claimants who were paid benefits in 2019 was actually down in 2019, at 129,888, from 130,710 in 2018. So, it appears that the 30-day quit exception is actually more significant in allowing claimants to receive unemployment benefits that what the Department is reporting.

The other research response that drew ire from management representatives was that the Department indicated that the ability of temp companies to immediately challenge claimant eligibility about missed interviews, declined job offers, and job search contacts was problematic during the initial modernization process. The Department indicated that these management proposals could eventually be implemented and indeed voiced support for them, but that the initial modernization effort could not include them because the modernization request for proposals had already been written and because claimant confidentiality issues would need to be addressed to allow employers to respond in the desired ways. Management reps, however, were unhappy with even this kind of delay. They want to object to claimant eligibility immediately.

Unemployment delays, part 6

Previous posts detailed the length of time and number of cases in the unemployment backlog in part 1, some of the mistakes by the Department that allow cases to be re-opened in part 2, a place for stories and advice about how to find assistance in part 3, how most claims in Wisconsin — and unlike in other states — are being denied and thereby creating a ginormous backlog in hearings in part 4, and in part 5 how the Department’s big push to fix the backlog in December 2020 was creating a hearings backlog and not addressing the root causes of all the delays.

Hard data regarding the Department’s handling of initial claims is now available about that big push for clearing the backlog.

Date        First   15 days 21 days 35 days
           payments
01/31/2021  18,094  64.70%  70.10%  77.00%
12/31/2020  35,548  49.50%  54.50%  61.70%
11/30/2020  13,676  65.00%  67.80%  71.70%
10/31/2020  10,249  56.10%  58.70%  62.20%
09/30/2020  8,709   50.40%  53.00%  57.10%
08/31/2020  11,144  53.10%  55.10%  57.50%
07/31/2020  15,410  39.20%  41.20%  43.90%
06/30/2020  18,862  39.30%  40.40%  42.60%
05/31/2020  36,273  33.00%  35.90%  47.50%
04/30/2020  183,447 81.90%  88.60%  98.80%
03/31/2020  26,472  95.50%  97.60%  99.00%
pandemic    377,884 57.06%  60.26%  65.36%

prepandemic 239,601 86.80%  92.86%  96.85%
(Jan. 2018 thru Feb. 2020)

As evident here, December 2020 saw a marked increase in first payments of initial claims, around 2.5x the number of payments in November 2020. Unfortunately, the number of first payments declined by half in January 2021.

This increase in first payments for December, however, is good news because the hearings backlog did not skyrocket. Previously, I had feared that the hearings backlog would be at 25,000. At the end of January 2021, the hearings backlog had only climbed to 15,915, up from 15,744 in December 2020.

So, kudos to the Department for clearing some cases by getting those cases approved.

Still, systemic problems with the processing of unemployment claims remain. This first payment data indicates that the effort to clear the backlog was a one-time event. TMJ4 reports that the processing delays have arisen in part because the Department added a bunch of new staffers with minimal training who then focus on specific issues rather than looking at the big picture.

Second, way too many initial claims are still NOT being paid. Through January 2021, Wisconsin has only made first payments of 27.98% of 147,260 PUA initial claims. For comparison, North Carolina has made first payments in 60% of 415,747 PUA initial claims, and New Jersey has made first payment of 76% out of 707,167 PUA initial claims.

For initial claims of regular unemployment benefits, Wisconsin has only made first payments of 30.85% out of 1,248,186 initial claims through the end of January 2021. Prior to the pandemic, the percentage of initial claims that ended up with a first payment in Wisconsin was 38.81%. So, Wisconsin is actually paying out fewer initial claims during the pandemic than from before the pandemic.

In comparison, Colorado’s first payments during the pandemic are at 64.20% out of 775,053 initial claims. Prior to the pandemic, the percentage of initial claims with first payments in Colorado was at 65.40%. In North Carolina, 44.82% of 1,642,172 initial claims for regular unemployment benefits during the pandemic led to first payments (prior to the pandemic, North Carolina was paying 45.25% of initial claims for regular unemployment benefits). Only New Jersey has seen a sharp decline in first payments for regular unemployment claims, paying 38.29% of 2,025,278 initial claims, down from 51.72% prior to the pandemic.

So, the claim-filing problems in Wisconsin are more severe than in any other state, including states like New Jersey and Colorado that still have COBOL-based mainframes on the back end of their claim-filing systems. The majority of initial claims in Wisconsin simply are NOT being paid at all.

Third and more troubling, there is now a major backlog with unemployment hearings that shows no signs of being cleared anytime soon. During the pandemic, the number of appeals filed per month have averaged 4,138 per month, while the number of appeal tribunal decisions has averaged 2,958 per month, more than a thousand less than the number of appeals. In January 2021, that gap declined to around 500 more appeals than decisions.

So, the size of this hearing backlog of around 16,000 cases now means that claimants will likely have to wait eight or more months for their cases to be heard.

And, the number of initial claims is still running more than 2x higher than normal. As a result, there are plenty of cases still in the pipeline.

w/e 2021    Week    Ratio   2021    2020    Difference
12/26/20    52      1.36    14,235  10,483  3,752
01/02/21    1       1.49    19,161  12,854  6,307 (new data source)
01/09/21    2       2.73    22,539  8,255   14,284
01/16/21    3       2.66    16,977  6,388   10,589
01/23/21    4       2.52    15,439  6,134   9,305
01/30/21    5       2.48    15,584  6,280   9,304
02/06/21    6       2.28    14,970  6,579   8,391
02/13/21    7       2.79    16,205  5,808   10,397
02/20/21    8       2.66    16,207  6,098   10,109
02/27/21    9       2.35    13,272  5,658   7,614
03/06/21    10      2.41    12,173  5,052   7,121
03/13/21    11              
Totals              2.22    176,762 79,589  97,173
Source: https://dwd.wisconsin.gov/uistats/

Out of 63 SSDI-PUA claimants I am currently working with, 21 are still waiting for their benefits, now a year into the pandemic. Only 26 (less than half) have been paid their PUA benefits without additional hiccups (and most of them were not paid until August and September of 2020). Most of the 21 claimants still waiting for any payment have yet to even have a hearing.

26 — Yes — PUA paid
13 –No — PUA claim denied
5 — ? — payment status unknown
8 — Yes & No — paid some, and then denied
6 — Not covid19 — denied because of no pandemic-related job loss
2 — Not A&A — denied because not able and available
3 — Yes, some — paid some PUA, waiting on rest
63 — Total claimants

As usual, John Oliver explains how truly broken unemployment is throughout the nation:

The failures in the unemployment system is a national problem. What has happened in Wisconsin is simply a “leading” indicator of how just how broken the system is. This propublica description of the claim-filing problems in North Carolina, for instance, also describes many of the same issues in Wisconsin about changes on making claim-filing more difficult, reducing already low employer taxes even further, and cutting off eligibility through additional claim-filing requirements.

Reporters have informed me that claimants are only winning around 30% of their appeal tribunal decisions after an appeal of an initial determining denying their claim (roughly the same percentage prior to the pandemic). That percentage is terrible. Almost all of the denials I am seeing are without any factual or legal merit but occur because the investigator has found a piece of information on the initial claim or a weekly certification to be less than perfect for establishing eligibility. This low win rate for unemployment hearings indicates that the biases against allowing benefits to claimants remain solidly in place: administrative law judges are looking for reasons and evidence for getting claims denied rather than explaining and helping claimants to get those denials over-turned.

So, having representation for these hearings is even more vital now, given the complexity of Wisconsin unemployment to begin with when coupled to the all of the new federal benefit programs that have been added.

I have done a video interview with the Wisconsin state bar where I plead for more lawyers to get involved with these unemployment cases.

Lawyers who want to help should read the unemployment primer, the Workers’ Guide to Unemployment Law, and look at the training done in May 2020 by Legal Action and Judicare. Marquette law school is providing the videos and materials for that training as well as other training sessions at this link.

Finally, law students at UW-Madison Law School have stepped up during this crisis and helped out with hundreds of claimants. They have done a remarkable job. Anyone interested in supporting the clinic’s efforts should visit the clinic’s gofundme page.

Upcoming testimony before a Senate Committee

Update (28 Jan. 2021): TMJ4 is perhaps the only media outlet in the state that actually describes what happened at the hearing over current problems with unemployment claims and how any computer updates are not a viable solution for those currently dealing with this mess.

I am scheduled to testify before the Senate Committee on Economic and Workforce Development this Wednesday, January 27th, at a public hearing starting at 10am, concerning Wisconsin unemployment.

Given the general lack of information about what is actually happening with the unemployment crisis, I have provided the committee a 199pp. PDF of the materials and a 3pp. letter describing those materials.

WisEye will be carrying the testimony live.

Some of the charts and tables in the informational packet include:

The year of 2007 should be considered a base year for how a healthy unemployment system in this state should function.

Notice that during the Great Recession first payments of benefits for the most part continued to be timely.

Except for Minnesota, Wisconsin has had fewer PUA claims that many other states and has paid far fewer PUA claims as a percentage than other states. New Jersey, like Wisconsin, has a COBOL mainframe for their unemployment claims. Yet, New Jersey’s handling of PUA claims shows incredible success compared to Wisconsin.

Update (27 Jan. 2021): My testimony and the testimony of others, including the Department, is available here. My testimony starts around 11am (an hour into the hearing), and runs 30-40 minutes. Here is a recap of my remarks about how disabled workers are being treated:

$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.

One group in particular has been hit hardest — the disabled.

Wisconsin is one of only two states that denies unemployment benefits to those who receive SSDI benefits. This eligibility ban was premised on the belief that only 50 workers would be affected by it.

That belief was not true. In any given year, there are 150,000+ SSDI working in Wisconsin (for 2019, see Table 27 at this link). To put that number in perspective, in the December 2020 jobs report for Wisconsin, there were 128,100 construction workers in this state, a ~22,000 short of the workers who receive SSDI benefits.

Wisconsin is allowing its employers to lay off these 150,000+ disabled workers and face no consequences for such layoffs. If unemployment was automobile insurance, then Wisconsin would exactly be saying that drivers could run over disabled people without any consequences to their auto insurance premiums. This is obscene.

So, a $1.1 billion unemployment trust fund has been built up on the backs of 150,000+ disabled workers in this state who by law cannot receive those unemployment benefits, against this explicit provision in Wis. Stat. § 108.01(1) (emphasis supplied):

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.

Unemployment delays, part 5

Previous posts detailed the length of time and number of cases in the unemployment backlog in part 1, some of the mistakes by the Department that allow cases to be re-opened in part 2, a place for stories and advice about how to find assistance in part 3, and how most claims in Wisconsin — and unlike in other states — are being denied and thereby creating a ginormous backlog in hearings in part 4.

The Department announced at the end of 2020 that the claims backlog had been cleared and that Transition Secretary Pechacek was now Secretary-Designee for the Department. According to the Department:

“Since the start of the pandemic, our top priority at DWD has been ensuring that all eligible unemployment claims in Wisconsin are paid as quickly as possible,” Pechacek said. “Today, I am proud to say we have reached our goal to clear the backlog of claims. The tireless work of DWD staff has made it possible for UI to resume its seasonal level of timeliness in January. I look forward to implementing further enhancements to our UI processes to continue to improve services to Wisconsinites who are out of work through no fault of their own.”

Unfortunately, hard data is not available. The Department’s weekly data post was last provided on Dec. 22nd, and the Department has revealed this week that the daily initial claims data will no longer be provided in lieu of a weekly summation.

The Department’s previous weekly data reports provide running totals of claimants paid unemployment benefits, initial claims that were filed, and the number of claimants still waiting on their claims to be adjudicated. When combined into one document, simple math in a spreadsheet allows for weekly changes in these totals to be tracked, and those weekly totals reveal that the “backlog” has largely been “fixed” by denying initial claims.

The first, brown line shows the weekly change in the number of initial claims filed by week. This data was reported in May 2020, whereas the rest of the data was not first reported until August 2020.

The green, triangle line reveals the number of claimants by week reported by the Department as being paid regular unemployment benefits. Until late December, this weekly number was the lowest being reported.

The purple, triangle line shows the weekly change in the number of claimants who were either not paid or denied regular unemployment benefits (initial claims minus paid claimants). Until early December, this number kept increasing until it plunged to under 5,000 for the 12/15/2020 data release.

The red, hourglass line shows the weekly change in denied claims (initial claims minus paid claimants and then minus claimants still waiting on adjudication). This number jumped markedly for the 9/29/2020 data release, then continued to increase by 10,000 a week to over 16,000 a week by the first December report. And, each subsequent week in December saw an even greater number of initial claims being denied, such that in the last two weeks there were more claims being denied than initial claims being filed (a difference of more than 10,000 for the final week of data).

Initial claims and claimants are not exactly interchangeable numbers, as there are circumstances where an individual claimant can have more than one initial claim. But, initial claim data is generally understood as a good proxy for the number of claimants in an unemployment system, and so is the statistic used in unemployment circles to assess how many actual people are filing claims because of job loss, especially since weekly claims data only really measures the number of claimants who have had their claims approved and are receiving benefits or are in the process of receiving benefits.

Because the Department has continued to rely on weekly claims data, the Department has under-reported the claims backlog and has completely missed the growing number of claims getting denied.

In a late-October memo to then Transition-Secretary Pechacek, I wrote the following about this counting problem:

Currently, the Department has been reporting weekly claims data as descriptive of how the Department has managed its pandemic response (more than 90% of weekly claims have been paid is a common talking point of the Department’s). Weekly claims data provides a measure of the financial drain on the unemployment trust fund and says little to nothing about the actual number of initial claims that have been filed with the pandemic or how many of those claims have actually been processed by the Department. Weekly claims data only indicates the number of weeks of benefits that have been claimed and so provides a measure of the “draw” on the unemployment trust fund. This statistic says nothing about the number of people who have denied their claims and those still waiting on their claims to be decided.

If you want to know how the Department is actually doing with its processing of unemployment claims, the traditional measures are around first payments and the average number of days needed for various steps (first payments, adjudication, and appeal tribunal decision). While the Department refuses to provide this data in response to queries, the Department must provide this data to the Dep’t of Labor. As a result, anyone conversant with unemployment has access to this data.

The picture this data paints is horrendous. Through the end of August, Wisconsin reports 918,757 initial claims connected to the pandemic (initial claims filed in March through August) and only 294,571 first payments for those same months, a percentage of 32.06%. Prior to the pandemic (the months from January 2018 through February 2020 — two years and two months), there were 632,728 initial claims and 245,558 first payments, a percentage of 38.81%. Not only are these percentages some of the lowest in the nation, Wisconsin may be the only state that has actually experienced a decline in first payments during the pandemic.

Note: Dep’t of Labor data for PUA claims filed from March thru August indicate that Wisconsin has paid 30.96% of 103,511 PUA initial applications. The percentage in other states is starkly better: North Carolina with 257,718 PUA initial claims is at 74.45%, Minnesota with 108,110 initial claims is at 86.87%, and Florida is at 88.91% for 329,289 PUA initial claims. Even Illinois with 335,533 initial PUA claims is at 45.15% (and without any August data).

And, denial rates have actually increased since the pandemic started, particularly for reasons that have nothing to do with an actual separation from work (i.e., a failure to follow a Department claim-filing requirement).

The data for when the Department first pays unemployment claims shows a major breakdown here as well. The Dep’t of Labor requires that 87% of all first payments must be made within 14 days (waiting week) or 21 days (no waiting week) and 93% within 35 days. See UIPL 21-04 (18 May 2004) (available at https://wdr.doleta.gov/directives/attach/UIPL21-04.pdf). First payment rates have plummeted in Wisconsin.

This combination of more claims being denied alongside the increased delays in paying claims that are eventually approved creates a second bottleneck at the adjudication stage. For the months from March through August of this year, only 52.58% of appeal tribunal decisions have been issued within 30 days and 78.73% on average have been issued within 45 days.

Note: The Dep’t of Labor threshold is 60% and 80% of these decisions, respectively.

These numbers are only going to get worse. At the end of August 2020, there were 9,655 cases pending before appeal tribunals, roughly 9x the number of pending cases that existed on a monthly basis prior to the pandemic. Granted, many of these cases are nonsensical and lead to quick hearings (since the administrative law judge is simply recognizing the obvious, like the claimant was laid off because of the pandemic). But, the administrative sludge created by this crush of cases is having its natural effect of short tempers among staffers at all levels and claimants giving up in the face of these mindless obstacles. As I explained in “Unemployment delays, part 1” (16 Sept. 2020) (available at https://wisconsinui.wordpress.com/2020/09/16/delays-part-1/):

“At the end of March, some major problems and bottlenecks in the claims-filing process were identified [https://wisconsinui.wordpress.com/2020/03/31/claims-and-phone-calls/]. Other than what was noted then, many of those bottlenecks continue to exist.

“On May 12th, as the claims piled up, processing delays were enormous [https://wisconsinui.wordpress.com/2020/05/12/backlogs-with-claims/]: a month was needed just to process a faxed or mailed document for an unemployment claim and more than a week just to get a document recognized by the hearing office after being received.

“Now in mid-September it still takes around 30 days for a claim document sent by mail or fax to be processed. And, information sent to a hearing office still takes 5+ days to be processed. Furthermore, while the clogged phone lines to reach a claim specialist have been opened up, it is now incredibly difficult to contact the hearing office by phone. In my experience, it takes numerous phones calls over a day or two and then a hold of 30 to 70 minutes or more before I can get through to a hearing office staffer.”

And, there is no glimpse of a decline in unemployment claims anytime soon. Right now, initial claims are on the rise, and the trajectory of the pandemic in the nation and in Wisconsin indicates that the situation is likely to get worse (week 11 was 1:1).

As of week 42, nearly 1 million initial claims have been filed in Wisconsin, and there are close to 120,000 PUA claims that have been filed (the approximate number of regular initial claims paid in all of 2019 or 2018). The unemployment system as currently designed and implemented is designed to stymie successful claims. Whereas before the pandemic folks simply gave up on unemployment and found low-wage work as a substitute, those job options are no longer available at the moment. So, not only will there never be a clearing of the claims backlog under the current system, but a tidal wave of cases will be created at the hearing stage regarding people will be challenging the unjust denial of their claims. Major change in how the Department handles unemployment claims is the only way to escape a new meltdown and political fallout.

On 14 December 2020, the Legislative Audit Bureau released an audit report on the Department’s claims-processing delays. The results of that audit bares out what I indicated back in October.

First, the audit revealed that the number of claimants waiting on their claims was much larger than being reported by the Department:

As of October 10, 2020, DWD had paid 493,504 of the 662,731 individuals (74.5 percent) who had filed initial claims for regular program benefits since March 15, 2020, but it had not paid the remaining 169,227 individuals (25.5 percent). DWD may not have paid these individuals because it had not yet resolved their claims, it had denied their claims, or the individuals had withdrawn their claims. The data we obtained from DWD did not indicate the reasons why DWD did not pay these claims.

Report 20-28 (Processing Certain Unemployment Insurance Claims) at 6. In comparison, in its October 13th report, the Department indicated that the weekly claims “in process” were only 8.12% of the weekly claims filed — a figure three times smaller than the actual number of claimants still waiting on their claims.

Second, the audit revealed that over three quarters of all initial claims were being adjudicated rather than just approved (as typically happens when both employer and employee report a layoff and there are no other “issues” discovered in the documents):

We found that DWD placed into adjudication the initial claims of 514,026 of the 662,731 individuals (77.6 percent) who filed claims from March 15, 2020, through October 10, 2020. DWD may place a given claim into adjudication because of multiple issues. As of October 10, 2020, 96,623 of the 514,026 individuals (18.8 percent) still had initial claims in adjudication.

Report 20-28 (Processing Certain Unemployment Insurance Claims) at 9.

Third, the audit bureau randomly sampled 268 individuals to assess how quickly the Department processed their claims.

our file review found that DWD had resolved the initial claims of 250 of the 268 individuals (93.3 percent) as of November 2020. DWD’s data indicate that 70 of the 144 individuals whose initial claims DWD had denied subsequently filed new claims after April 11, 2020. As of October 10, 2020, 34 of those 70 individuals were paid program benefits.

Report 20-28 (Processing Certain Unemployment Insurance Claims) at 12. The audit bureau concluded:

it took an average of 13.0 weeks to resolve the initial claims of the 250 individuals in our file review. We estimate that it took an average of 11.5 weeks to deny the claims of the 144 individuals and an average of 15.5 weeks to pay program benefits to the 103 individuals.

We estimate that DWD was responsible for 11.0 of the 13.0 weeks (84.6 percent) that it took, on average, to resolve the initial claims of the 250 individuals. For example, DWD was responsible for time that elapsed before it requested information it needed from individuals and employers, and for time that elapsed after it had the information necessary to pay or deny program benefits but did not do so. In contrast, DWD was not responsible for time that elapsed while it waited for individuals and employers to provide information it had requested.

Our file review found more than 950 instances when DWD was responsible for time elapsing while it processed the initial claims of the 268 individuals. The 268 individuals each experienced, on average, more than 3.5 instances when DWD was responsible for time elapsing during initial claims processing. A given claim could have multiple instances if, for example, time elapsed before DWD requested information from individuals or employers, and then additional time elapsed after DWD received the information.

This last point reveals a state agency overwhelmed with so much work that staffers cannot even look at case files in a timely way. Unlike every other state, however, Wisconsin has NOT changed its adjudication process whatsoever in the face of the pandemic (CA: weekly claims allowed every other week; every other state but WI: waiving investigation of benefit year separations for pandemic-related job losses, since employer accounts are not charged for any benefits connected to such job losses).

So, the delays revealed by the audit bureau are a natural consequence of Department staffers still trying to do the same job they have been doing for the last few years alongside the same denial criteria and impulses without any pressure from above to approve claims or altering the adjudication process in light of the tidal waive of claims connected to the pandemic.

Given that most initial claims are being denied, all the problems revealed by the audit bureau are making their way to the hearing office. Simple errors are popping up all over the place, for no other reason than because staffers and administrative law judges are being overwhelmed with their workload. Hearings are generally short — since eligibility facts are already in the investigatory record and just need to be entered into the hearing record. But, getting all those decisions written and properly entered is causing problems I have never seen to this extent before. Almost every case now is falling into limbo because of some processing error that hearing office staffers now are having great difficulty fixing.

My December has been about as bad as it has ever been with this pandemic. And, given the skyrocketing number of claims that were denied in December, I suspect that these hearing office problems are only expanding.

We are in for a world of hurt for 2021, I fear.

Update (5 Jan. 2021): tjm4 has a review of the ongoing claims-handling problems at the Department, and the Racine Journal-Times details these on-going problems as systemic.

Unemployment delays, part 4

Previous posts detailed the length of time and number of cases in the unemployment backlog in part 1, some of the mistakes by the Department that allow cases to be re-opened in part 2, and a place for stories and advice about how to find assistance in part 3.

Jake explains in posts on Nov. 14th and Nov. 19th that:

• job losses are now spiking both nationally and state-wide,
• the ensuing loss of PUA benefits at the end of 2020 is a fiscal cliff for millions, and
• continuing claims demonstrate that long-term job losses are becoming entrenched.

Wisconsin’s own jobs report for October 2020 reinforced these conclusions, as the state unemployment rate rose markedly because of losses in leisure and hospitality and the public sector.

The actual initial claims data indicates that the pandemic has created a systemic increase in the number of new initial claims being filed every single week.

Since the start of the pandemic, initial claims have leveled off to around 5x what was filed for the comparable week in 2019. There are two noticeable dips where the ratio dropped significantly down below five: first for the weeks 35-37 and again for the weeks 44-47. The reason for these dips, however, are quite different. In weeks 35-37, there was an actual decline in the number of initial claims being filed in 2020. In weeks 44-47, on the other hand, the drop in the ratio is not from a decline of initial claims in 2020 but from an increase in initial claims that were filed in 2019.

w/e 2020  Week  Ratio   2020    2019 
03/14/20    11  1.02    5,698   5,587
03/21/20    12  13.29   69,342  5,216
03/28/20    13  20.51   115,679 5,640
04/04/20    14  19.95   103,226 5,173
04/11/20    15  14.21   65,654  4,619
04/18/20    16  12.12   56,038  4,624
04/25/20    17  10.64   48,630  4,570
05/02/20    18  9.47    39,278  4,146
05/09/20    19  8.73    35,134  4,026
05/16/20    20  9.21    31,851  3,460
05/23/20    21  7.28    26,384  3,626
05/30/20    22  6.16    22,835  3,709
06/06/20    23  4.90    22,497  4,592
06/13/20    24  4.51    24,226  5,373
06/20/20    25  4.31    23,773  5,514
06/27/20    26  6.00    29,727  4,956
07/04/20    27  5.35    27,619  5,159
07/11/20    28  4.93    27,774  5,631
07/18/20    29  6.14    23,396  3,808
07/25/20    30  5.94    20,951  3,530
08/01/20    31  4.76    17,702  3,717
08/08/20    32  3.79    14,467  3,816
08/15/20    33  4.75    15,484  3,262
08/22/20    34  4.29    14,092  3,287
08/29/20    35  3.44    13,122  3,818
09/05/20    36  3.48    13,025  3,742
09/12/20    37  3.44    12,432  3,619
09/19/20    38  4.40    14,012  3,186
09/26/20    39  4.86    15,225  3,131
10/03/20    40  4.41    16,876  3,824
10/10/20    41  5.38    20,985  3,904
10/17/20    42  5.06    18,113  3,577
10/24/20    43  4.44    17,731  3,990
10/31/20    44  3.62    17,961  4,956
11/07/20    45  2.90    17,136  5,911
11/14/20    46  2.66    18,500  6,951
11/21/20    47  2.49    19,967  8,031
                6.81 1,090,844  160,094

As Wisconsin still has winter, there are a host of industries (road construction, landscaping, recreation, and others) that lay off their workers on a seasonal basis, and so there is a steady rise in initial claims every year for these Wisconsin workers. As a result, this latest dip in the ratio does NOT represent an actual decline in initial claims in 2020. Rather, all that is happening is that the number of cases in 2020 is simply not rising enough to match the increases from 2019. All told, pandemic-related claims are still much higher than last year, as Wisconsin has experienced an increase of roughly 7x the initial claims from what was previously filed in 2019.

And, most of these 2020 claimants are seeing their initial unemployment claims denied. The percentage of regular unemployment claims leading to a first payment of benefits is actually down in Wisconsin from before the pandemic.

For the months of January 2018 through February 2020, there were 632,728 initial claims in Wisconsin, of which 245,558 led to first payments, a percentage of regular unemployment claims being paid of 38.81%.

Here is the monthly initial claims data for Wisconsin for the months of the pandemic:

Month      Initial  1st Pay     %
10/31/20    62,178   10,156  16.33
09/30/20    50,918    9,981  19.60
08/31/20    68,312   11,677  17.09
07/31/20    120,078  15,252  12.70
06/30/20    112,520  19,034  16.92
05/31/20    135,138  35,508  26.28
04/30/20    243,208 183,828  75.58
03/31/20    239,501  29,272  12.22
          1,031,853 314,708  30.50%

Source: https://tcf-ui-data.shinyapps.io/ui-data-explorer/

So, during this pandemic, Wisconsin is actually paying out fewer claims than it did from before the pandemic. Less than one out of three initial claims are leading to a first payment, whereas before the pandemic nearly two our of every five claims was being paid.

For comparison, here are initial claims and first payment data during the pandemic for several other states:

ST  Initial     1st Pay     %
NC  1,452,638    700,687  48.24
MI  1,997,061  1,168,887  58.53
FL  3,298,791  1,578,803  47.86
IL  2,037,211  1,063,231  52.19
AR    412,425    179,558  43.54
PA  2,233,652  1,201,647  53.80
IN  1,322,840    553,568  41.85
OR    621,445    357,489  57.53

Source: https://tcf-ui-data.shinyapps.io/ui-data-explorer/

In all these state but Illinois, the percentage of first payments is up from before the pandemic (Illinois declined slightly from a pre-pandemic percentage of 56.34%). Even Oregon, subject to a state law suit over the slow claims-processing in that state, has managed to pay out well more than half of the claims it has managed to process.

All of these claims being denied in Wisconsin has led to a staggering backlog in hearings.

Prior to the pandemic, appeal tribunals were issuing around 1,200 to 1,500 decisions a month. Here is what happened with the pandemic:

Month  Pending  Filed   Decided
Oct    12,771   4,480   3,289
Sept.  11,052   4,414   3,063
Aug     9,655   4,860   3,236
July    6,719   4,442   4,083
June    6,309   3,307   3,363
May     6,296   4,922   3,724
April   5,090   6,034   2,492
March   1,520   1,952   1,565
               34,411  24,815

In the last few months, more than 4,000 appeals of initial determinations have been filed every single month. Administrative law judges are now issuing more than 3,000 decisions these same months. But, they cannot keep up, and the backlog of pending cases is, at the end of October 2020, nearly 13,000 cases. If not a single appeal was filed after October 31st, it would still take around four months to clear the current backlog of cases that need a hearing.

For comparison, in Illinois, which has twice the number of initial claims that Wisconsin has, pending cases before an administrative law judge at the end of October numbered just 2,069. Pennsylvania has a backlog at the end of October of 3,950 pending cases — one-third of the backlog in Wisconsin — even though Pennsylvania has handled more than twice the number of initial claims than Wisconsin has.

Given the backlog of cases in Wisconsin, it is no wonder that folks should now expect to wait four to six months for their hearing. Because Wisconsin has kept every possible disqualification alive during this pandemic except for the four job searches a week and so is investigating any and all potential disqualifications — even issues going as far back as January 2019 — the system simply cannot keep up. The more people that are hired at the Department simply means more cases that have to be adjudicated.

So, if not approved for unemployment benefits soon after filing an initial claim, expect to wait several months or longer for a decision. And, if that initial determination does not go your way, expect to wait four to eight months for your hearing after filing your appeal.

All I can offer at the moment is the possible assistance described in part 3 of this series. Unemployment in Wisconsin truly is broken.

Unemployment delays, part 1

There has been an unemployment meltdown in Wisconsin. Claimants wait and wait and wait for their cases to be decided, but no one is asking about the extent of these delays or why they are occurring.

Here are some answers.

Longer times

First, take note of a statistic the Department has been reporting after the pandemic had been underway for a few months: the average number of days from initial application to first payment (or initial determination denying benefits). Rather than decreasing as the number of initial claims and PUA claims have declined and the number of staffers have more than tripled, this number has actually been increasing, going from 19 days to 24 days.

In other words, the Department’s ability to process unemployment applications has gotten worse over the course of this pandemic, not better.

Fewer regular UI claims being paid

Using the federal unemployment data that all states report and which is available for analysis at Unemployment Insurance Data Explorer and based on this federal unemployment data, Wisconsin is actually paying out fewer unemployment claims on a percentage basis during the pandemic than from before the pandemic.

Wisconsin

Regular UI claims during the pandemic (March-Aug. 2020)
Initial claims   First payments    Percentage
918,757          294,571           32.06%

Regular UI claims prior to the pandemic (Jan. 2018-Feb. 2020)
Initial claims   First payments    Percentage
632,728          245,558           38.81%

So, Wisconsin is actually paying fewer initial claims during the pandemic than before the pandemic. It appears that no other state has a similarly significant decline in claims being paid out during the pandemic.

For comparison, here is what has happened in other states in regards to how many initial applications for regular unemployment benefits are being paid for the same time periods:

State   Pre-pandemic  Pandemic
NC      45.25%        50.27%
MI      54.70%        60.53%
FL      45.36%        49.76%
AR      39.60%        45.98%
IN      47.78%        46.77%
IL      56.34%        57.72%

Indiana shows a 1% decline during the pandemic, but at least around half of its initial claims are ending up with payment of benefits. Even Florida (!) has managed to pay out more claims during the pandemic than before the pandemic.

These numbers also reveal that the number of claimants receiving regular unemployment in Wisconsin is much lower than in other states, the same states that are decried in the national press as having terrible unemployment systems. During this pandemic in Wisconsin, less than one-third of initial claims have actually led to a payment of regular unemployment benefits. This decline is from roughly 39% of initial claims from before the pandemic. And, unlike all other states, including those who had massive problems with administering all of their pandemic claims, Wisconsin’s handling of these claims is trending down rather than up.

Note: Here is the spreadsheet that has this data.

Because there are errors in the data states report, some of this data is incomplete. For instance, Minnesota reports weekly claims being paid sizable amounts, nearly 91% of all pandemic claims. But, Minnesota also reports only 1.36% of initial claims being paid out. So, first payment data for Minnesota is in error. Another example of an error is the PUA data for Michigan. Even though Michigan is widely-acknowledged leader in paying out PUA benefits, this data for Michigan has zero PUA claims and payments.

These data errors do not appear to explain the claims-filing problems in Wisconsin. The numbers being reported here approximately match what Wisconsin itself is reporting. Moreover, the percentages or proportions of weeks claimed to weeks paid, for instance, match what the Department itself reported on Sept. 1st. So, there do not appear to be errors in what Wisconsin is reporting to the US Dep’t of Labor. The numbers for Wisconsin indicate a very real problem.

PUA claims

Wisconsin’s handling of PUA claims is even worse. Here is Wisconsin and a few other states for which data is available.

State   Month   Init App  First Payment
WI      Jul     13,298    17,269
WI      Jun     13,044     6,286
WI      May     23,887       709
WI      Apr     43,585         0
WI    totals    93,814    24,264    25.86%

NC      Jul     49,478    27,948
NC      Jun     54,338    35,799
NC      May    111,094    95,538
NC      Apr     42,808    32,582
NC    totals   257,718   191,867    74.45%

MN      Jul     2,877      4,251
MN      Jun     4,353     10,089
MN      May    14,908     26,682
MN      Apr    64,350     46,589
MN      Mar    21,622      6,304
MN    totals  108,110     93,915    86.87%

FL     Jun    133,501    126,769
FL     May    126,334    105,885
FL     Apr     18,273        338
FL    totals  278,108    232,992    83.78%

Note: Here is the spreadsheet for this PUA claims data. And, here is the raw PUA claims data from the US Dep’t of Labor.

These numbers are staggeringly awful for Wisconsin. Wisconsin is failing to process these claims even though Wisconsin has the fewest number of claims to process among these states. By the end of July, just a quarter of PUA applicants in Wisconsin had their claims paid out. This number is roughly three times less than what is happening in these other states.

Notably, even Florida managed to pay out some PUA claims in April, whereas Wisconsin did not significantly start processing PUA claims until June of this year. No wonder folks in Wisconsin are still waiting on their PUA claims: Wisconsin is doing very little to process these claims and, unlike other states, is not paying out these claims in any way comparable to what is happening in those other states.

No action whatsoever for almost 300,000 claims

Via its weekly data reports, Wisconsin has been reporting on “weeks compensated” rather than initial claims being paid. As a result, those reports say nothing about the experience of individual claimants who are still waiting for any payments. This ‘data’ being reported by the Department is covering up the significant administrative problems that are going on.

But, some actual data can be gleaned from these reports. The Sept. 14th report, for instance, reveals that there have been 902,717 initial applications for regular unemployment benefits during the pandemic, that 98,309 of these are in adjudication, and that 513,870 of these claimants have received regular unemployment benefits. So, based on these numbers, there are 290,538 initial applications that have yet to have ANY action taken whatsoever — no denial, no approval, no nothing.

Note: Above, over 600,000 Wisconsin claimants are reported as still waiting on first payments. Whereas in these weekly data releases, the Department is reporting only around 300,000 still waiting.

The first page of the August 2020 financial report to the Advisory Council seems to confirm that more than 500,000 claimants have been paid regular unemployment benefits in 2020. But, this report also indicates that “in calendar year 2018 and 2019, the number of claimants paid were [only] 130,710 and 129,888, respectively.” That number matches almost exactly what the Department reported to the US Dep’t of Labor prior to the pandemic.

It appears that for its weekly data reports, the Department is including some data as a payment where no actual payment is occurring. The benefit amount reduction, or BAR, comes to mind as a possible explanation. The Department has been illegally using this program to deny $600 PUC benefits to claimants because of prior concealment. Furthermore, the Department typically still counts regular unemployment benefits as paid to these claimant even though they are receiving nothing because of a BAR.

In any case, the Department’s own data indicates that just under 300,000 Wisconsin employees are still waiting on their claims to be paid as of mid-September.

Given that the workforce in Wisconsin is around 3 million workers, this number of 290,538 initial applications indicates that roughly one out of ten Wisconsinites are still waiting on the Department to do something with their claim.

And, as the number of claims being adjudicated has been declining on average by around 407 a week during this pandemic according to the Department’s own numbers of claims awaiting adjudication, the unemployed are going to wait for a long, long time until the Department actually processes their claims. No wonder the average number of days from application to payment or denial is increasing in this state rather than declining.

Breakdowns in claims administration

All of these delays create an additional problem for claimants — the claims-processing procedures are even further clogged.

At the end of March, some major problems and bottlenecks in the claims-filing process were identified. Other than what was noted then, many of those bottlenecks continue to exist.

On May 12th, as the claims piled up, processing delays were enormous: a month was needed just to process a faxed or mailed document for an unemployment claim and more than a week just to get a document recognized by the hearing office after being received.

Now in mid-September it still takes around 30 days for a claim document sent by mail or fax to be processed. And, information sent to a hearing office still takes 5+ days to be processed. Furthermore, while the clogged phone lines to reach a claim specialist have been opened up, it is now incredibly difficult to contact the hearing office by phone. In my experience, it takes numerous phones calls over a day or two and then a hold of 30 to 70 minutes or more before I can get through to a hearing office staffer.

Because Wisconsin (unlike all other states) has done little to nothing to change the claims-filing process in light of the pandemic, these kind of delays and obstacles remain. Appeals of benefits being denied for illogical reasons which are filed in August will likely not be heard at a hearing until October or maybe even early November.

The unemployment system in this state is broken.

Update (17 Sept. 2020): The NYTimes has an excellent primer on unemployment data and the hazards of drawing conclusions from continuing claims (which the Department itself has featured in its weekly data reports). The focus above in this post is on initial claims and first payments, not continuing claims and total number of unemployed or total amounts paid out. Initial claims and first payments should be relatively straight forward numbers.

Update (25 Sept. 2020): The Economic Policy Institute provides an explanation of about how pandemic claims data is inflated in some states and how unemployment rates under-report actual unemployment and both under-employment.

There is no reason to think that Wisconsin is over-reporting its claims data, however, or that Wisconsin’s unemployment rate (which is based on a national survey) is somehow not also under-reporting unemployment and under-employment in this state.

Another reason why Wisconsin UI is faring so poorly: terrible job growth in 2019

Jake has the 2019 gold standard numbers, and they are just terrible.

Wisconsin’s rate of job growth started to decline in mid-2016, and has pretty much gone down since then, with the except of a Bubbly 6 months after the GOP Tax Scam was signed into law. But last year was a new depth, with barely more than 5,000 jobs added from December 2018 to December 2019, and we even slipped below 0 in November before a small rebound in the last month of 2019.

Jake compares the jobs picture in Wisconsin with Minnesota, and the comparison does not go well for Wisconsin.

Total jobs added, QCEW 2010-2019
Minnesota    330,103
Wisconsin    227,993
Difference   102,110

Jake further points out that the 2019 data for Wisconsin reveals that Dane County by itself is providing the job growth for the entire state.

Jobs added, Wisconsin 2019
Dane County    +7,446
REST OF WIS    -2,367

As Jake concludes:

This data sure seems to indicate that we could learn something by being more like Minnesota and Dane County, because that’s what was working before the COVID-19 recession hammered everyone starting in March. And today’s report is yet another blaring piece of evidence of just how much we have been held back during the Age of Fitzwalkerstan. It needs to be ended ASAP, and it goes well beyond changing who is in the Governor’s office.

Because job growth has been so anemic in Wisconsin, unemployment is that much more important as a wage replacement. But, as indicated previously, Wisconsin’s policies over the last decade have made unemployment much, much more difficult to get. Now with the pandemic and absolutely no jobs available at all, folks who have been suffering under meager job growth the past decade have absolutely nothing to fall back on other than unemployment. And, that system is designed to be difficult and cumbersome.

The Evers administration could start fixing this system by actually following the law rather than subverting it, as it is currently doing by denying PUA benefits to the disabled (see the discussion of SSDI in this post). And, the Evers administration could take a look at what our neighbor in Michigan is doing to make an equally difficult unemployment system at least less burdensome on claimants and the workers who have to administer that system. The results of these efforts in Michigan speak for themselves:

Chart courtesy of NELP

In comparison to Michigan, Wisconsin will only begin to start paying out PUA benefits next week.

Wisconsin remains . . .

Taxes and spending

Jake has a look at the latest WisPolicy Forum report on taxing and spending in the mid-west.

As Jake observes from the report, for the twenty-year period from 1997 to 2017, Wisconsin has led the mid-west in declining tax revenues, a commensurate decline in education spending, and a comparative increase in spending on Medicaid, corrections, and highways. These changes, Jake explains, are tied directly to the policy choices of recent years.

For example, a reason Medicaid spending is higher in Wisconsin because we refuse to take the expanded Medicaid in the Affordable Care Act, which would push those expenses onto the Feds instead of us (on a related note, a Pew report earlier this year placed Wisconsin 45th in the country for federal aid).

On the Corrections side, this is an obvious effect of the “lock em up” mentality of WisGOPs that has ended up with the state spending more on Corrections than the UW System. The “6th in the US” highway spending number can be connected back to a huge increase in local wheel taxes to fix roads that Scott Walker and the WisGOP Legislature refused to pay for.

Two things should be added to this post and the WisPolicy Forum’s tax report, however. First, the report is only dealing with changes in averages. So, the big shift in Wisconsin in the tax burden away from the wealthy and onto the shoulders of the middle-class is ignored. And, the over-reliance on property taxes in Wisconsin for funding local government and schools only makes this discrepancy worst, as property taxes based on a flat percentage are inherently regressive.

Second, several taxes are left out of this analysis completely, including unemployment taxes that employers pay on the first $14,000 of annual income paid to each employee. The 2018 Tax Measures Report has all of this tax information. Compared to the other fifty states, Wisconsin’s unemployment taxes are below average:

2018 Tax Measures Report at 64. As seen here, in 2018 Wisconsin’s average unemployment tax burden for employers was $255. For comparison, Minnesota’s was $340, Michigan’s was $352, and Iowa’s was $318.

Other measures likewise indicate that the unemployment tax burden on employers is exceptionally low in Wisconsin among mid-western states:

Average employer contribution in 2018 for every $100 in wages paid to an employee
Wis. 0.54
Minn. 0.56
Mich. 0.64
Iowa 0.69

For every dollar of tax paid in 2018, the amount going to
Benefits owed / Trust fund surplus
Wis. 0.75 / 0.25
Minn. 0.94 / 0.06
Mich. 0.63 / 0.37
Iowa 1.08 / -0.08

2018 Tax Measures Report at 62, 34, 33, and 26, respectively.

So, Wisconsin has the lowest unemployment tax burden of these four states, and 25 cents of every tax dollar being paid is going into the trust fund (only Michigan is saving more monies than Wisconsin for its trust fund).

Compared to these other states, then, employers in Wisconsin have little to complain about relative to employers in other mid-western states. And, this now very light tax burden in Wisconsin is very much the result of state policies that have made it difficult to impossible for employees to qualify for unemployment benefits or which make it difficult for employees to even files a successful claim.