Florida’s jobless benefits program finding new ways to confound, infuriate the unemployed

Floridians by the thousands will try again Tuesday to seek jobless benefits through the state’s cratering CONNECT system, which malfunctioned Monday despite being offline over the weekend for upgrades. Many who applied for unemployment benefits in March continue waiting, and some are just now receiving notices without explanation that they are ineligible.

Jamie Stewart has waited since completing her application for benefits on March 21 and has all but given up on her online options. After repeated error messages Monday, she hoped the telephone might be a better option. As evening approached, she had dialed more than 200 times — she’s kept count — still no luck and no explanation. It’s been five weeks.

“Nothing has changed since,” said Stewart, who was laid off from a luxury resort in Bonita Springs and is burning through savings intended for the purchase of a house. “I have gotten no correspondence in the mail, no response to emails that I tried to send — because they kept sending a message that their mailbox is full.”

Cinthia Carranza needs answers to why she was deemed ineligible for benefits. She tried from March 26 to March 28 to apply for unemployment benefits, after losing her job in Sunrise as the international sales manager for a beauty company. Setting her alarm for 2 a.m., she was able to get through — something impossible now at that hour as the CONNECT system is shut down for maintenance at 8 p.m. nightly. It’s been a month since, and she just learned the troubled system has declared her ineligible.

“I held a full-time job. I checked with my HR personnel,” said Carranza, who has two kids to feed and saw her colleague in New York who was laid off a week later already receive payment. “There is correspondence in the inbox that says I didn’t meet the requirement for work search.”

That’s one of numerous glitches in the aging and failing CONNECT system. Gov. Ron DeSantis waived the requirement that Floridians fulfill a work search during a time when businesses are closed in order to halt the spread of the coronavirus. It even says so on the Reemployment Assistance Program’s web page — that no work search is necessary — yet Carranza has received a message that she failed to look for work.

To make matters worse, Carranza’s health insurance requires her to pay $700 a month toward the annual premium. Guess where her $1,200 federal stimulus check is going.

“There is no one to speak to. There is just no answer,” she said.

While unemployment systems across the nation are struggling under the crush of new claims amid a pandemic, Florida stands out because it lags so far behind other large states. The Florida Department of Economic Opportunity said late last week that only one in five claims have been processed, and the failures mask the true size of unemployment in the state.

The difficulties are in part due to a deliberate decision by former Gov. Rick Scott’s administration to make it difficult to collect unemployment benefits. The agency in charge of that was euphemistically renamed the Reemployment Assistance Program, and hurdles were put in place to discourage taking benefits and encourage taking a new job. The assumption was that the state’s historically low unemployment rate and an abundance of hourly payroll jobs would lessen the need to receive jobless benefits.

But these changes didn’t account for a national unemployment rate north of 15 percent, something Trump administration economic adviser Kevin Hassett signaled Monday was probable when the Labor Department reports unemployment numbers on May 8.

For many In Florida, a wait on benefits that was inconvenient has now reached a point of desperation.

“I am not making ends meet. I have no income at all,” said Abbigayle Sabel, 23, who moved to Coral Gables from Arizona fresh out of college and into a sales job with a national dermatological company, which laid off workers at the end of March.

Sabel managed to fill out her online application April 4 but was recently informed she is ineligible. Why? She doesn’t know.

The last time Sabel was able to get on the CONNECT system, it led her to a page that asked her to identify her issue to be sent to a determination page. But there was no hyperlink to click on.

“Mine doesn’t have an issue ID. I can’t even see why I am ineligible,” she said, noting she got error messages on the website all of Monday. “It’s also where you the start the appeals process, so I can’t appeal.”

The Herald put out a request on Twitter Monday afternoon to hear from Floridians stymied by the malfunctioning CONNECT website, and within minutes dozens began responding. The woes had the constant theme, no explanations and no ability to get to anyone who can help.

“I was denied unemployment benefits and suffered a job loss / furloughed due to COVID-19, been waiting on approval for about a month and logged on this morning to find I was denied,” Paul Nardozza wrote in an email. “Please pass this to the state of Florida, they need to help their residents. I understand it’s a large volume but bills rent etc keep coming in. Thanks pass to state of Florida please!!”

Paige Marinelli, a wardrobe stylist, wrote late Monday to say she’d just learned that she’d been denied.

“I applied on March 29th, after trying to apply the week previous to that but was unable to do so because of the website malfunctions. Now after waiting a month, I go on to find out I am ineligible even though I meet all the requirements and had checked off that I was applying due to Covid-19,” she wrote. “According to [Gov. Ron] DeSantis the people deemed ineligible are only people who had been out of work for a while, but that is simply not true. Plenty of people who are completely eligible have been denied benefits. Like many others, I feel hopeless and scared. I am hoping that if enough people speak up we can actually do something.”

Daniel Flannery wrote to say he applied for jobless benefits on March 30, only to find he’d been denied.

“No information provided why, and no way to appeal. I was asked to begin application process again,” he said. “Please publicize and raise awareness of Floridians’ plight.”

Even worse for some, they can’t even get into their account to see if they’ve been denied benefits.

“It’s like Russian roulette trying to get in. If you get in, you have a short period of time before you are kicked back out again,” said Karissa Brower, a Fort Lauderdale bartender who lost her job in March and is awaiting benefits weeks later. “I can’t pay my bills, and I am wondering where my money is going to come from.”

In an interview, Brower said she feels betrayed by her state government. It ordered businesses closed but is not delivering on the help that was promised to her. She wants to work and took offense when now-Republican Sen. Rick Scott wrote in an op-ed last week that some workers might make more on unemployment than they did working.

What really upset her though was what Scott said in a campaign fundraising email, reported by the Tampa Bay Times, that “employees don’t want to come back to work” because of jobless benefits.

“I took that personally. I got extremely angry, and I started crying because this guy doesn’t get it,” Brower said, noting her unemployment benefits would be far less than she earned. “This guy doesn’t get it, and pardon my French, but he doesn’t give a [expletive].”

This article has been updated to correct the spelling of Abbigayle Sabel’s name.