FL Gov Puts New Boss In Charge Of Lagging Unemployment System

D'Ann Lawrence White
·3 min read

ACROSS FLORIDA — Frustrated with the continued backlog of unemployment claims from Floridians who have lost their jobs due to the coronavirus, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis announced that he's assigned the state's technological guru to oversee the unemployment process.

At his daily press briefing Wednesday, DeSantis said he's putting Jonathan Satter, secretary of the Department of Management Services, in charge of the unemployment system. DeSantis said Satter oversees all of the government's technical projects and is confident that the can work the bugs out of the unemployment system.

Ken Lawson will remain executive director of the Department of Economic Opportunity but will no longer be tasked with overseeing unemployment assistance related to recent job losses due to the coronavirus.

DeSantis said it will be Satter's job to streamline the unemployment system, ensuring that jobless Floridians can log into the system, fill out their applications and receive their unemployment checks in a timely manner.

"His mission is very simple: Get assistance out as quickly as you can," DeSantis said. "I hope that Jon can get in there, rattle the cage and get it done."

Currently, the time between submission of an unemployment application and receiving a check is about three weeks.

"In my judgment that's too long," he said. "It's not a time to get bogged down in bureaucracy and red tape."

DeSantis also said the current system makes it difficult to determine how many unemployment applications have been processed and how many people have been paid benefits.

"Every morning I should know how many claims have been paid," he said. "Right now it's hard for me to even get those numbers, and that's unacceptable."

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In Florida, jobless claims tripled to 227,000 last week as more businesses shut down due to the coronavirus pandemic. However, the Department of Labor said those statistics might not reflect the true unemployment figures in Florida since so many jobless residents have had difficulty applying for benefits through the state's website.

DeSantis said there have been some improvements in the system, however, and he's counting on Satter to upgrade the system further.

"I was disappointed in the initial response in terms of this website and I basically put the message out that we've got to do better," he said. "And I am happy that there's been a lot of progress."

He said the state added 100 new servers to build the capacity of the website to handle the hundreds of thousands of claims and now have 1,000 working in the unemployment call center.

Additionally, the state brought a new mobile user-friendly Pega site online where people can file unemployment claims. To date, more than 500,000 people have applied for benefits using the new Pega site.

"These are folks who couldn't get in through the old system, but are now getting in here," DeSantis said.

Florida has also made paper applications available to jobless residents across the state and Federal Express has offered to mail the unemployment applications to Tallahassee for free. DeSantis said the state has already received tens of thousands of paper applications through Fed Ex.

"I'm mindful very much of all the individual workers who have been displaced by this sudden shock to the system," he said. "These are folks have been working hard, they were doing the right things and, through no fault of their own, have found themselves in a state of unemployment."

More than 6.6 million Americans applied for unemployment benefits last week — twice as many as the record high set one week earlier. That means nearly 10 million people have been laid off in recent weeks.

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This article originally appeared on the Tampa Patch