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Have you claimed your benefits?
- Yes, I got all my benefits.
- Yes, but I only got some of my benefits.
- No, I am still waiting.
- No, and I need to speak with an agent.
The newly-approved claims include 60,000 new federal Pandemic Unemployment Assistance (PUA) applicants, state Labor Department Commissioner Robert Asaro-Angelo said at a Thursday coronavirus briefing.
All totaled, nearly 1.1 million workers in the Garden State have successfully applied for jobless benefits during eight weeks of layoffs and nearly 800,000 of those are receiving benefits, Asaro-Angelo said.
Nearly everyone who is eligible for this benefit and applied by April 12 will have been processed, Asaro-Angelo said, noting his staff is working longer hours and weekends.
There were 69,689 new applications filed the week ending May 9, according to the New Jersey Department of Labor and Workforce Development. New applications peaked in late March and early April, when more than 200,000 workers were filing claims each week.
New Jersey workers who are eligible for unemployment may receive 60 percent of their wages, up to $713, for up to 26 weeks. Recipients also receive $600 in additional federal PUA payments from coronavirus stimulus packages.
The latest jobless totals come as at least 9,946 residents have died and more than 152,000 have tested positive for the coronavirus statewide. Nearly 9 million people live in New Jersey.
"I am proud of the progress,''' Asaro-Angelo said, noting that most of the latest processing delays are due to applicants answering a question incorrectly on their weekly check-ins. The state labor commissioner said such mistakes led to 40,000 "lockouts" last week alone -- delaying new payments to most of those unemployed workers.
As previously reported, the jobless payment system was built on an aging mainframe and used a nearly 50-year-old coding language that hasn’t been taught regularly since before 2000.
In a 2003 report, the state Department of Labor outlined the critical need to modernize the state’s outdated unemployment website. A failure to do so, the report cautioned, could lead to catastrophic problems in a time of crisis like the COVID-19 pandemic.
The 2003 report was one of roughly a half-dozen warnings over the past 19 years that urged state lawmakers on both sides of the aisle to map out plans for an overhaul of the unemployment system, nj.com reported. The current backlog could have been avoided, according to NJ Advance Media's analysis of public records and state documents.
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