Hearings have stood in way of thousands of Virginians getting timely unemployment benefits

Theresa “Terri” Young counts herself lucky for never having had to lean on social programs until now. This time, though, has been different. There were no options, no other way to work things out to get back on solid financial footing.

Like hundreds of thousands of other Virginians, she found herself in need of income in mid-March as the pandemic was entering everyone’s collective minds and businesses began scaling back and closing. The Chesapeake grandmother spent months going back and forth with the Virginia Employment Commission in hopes of getting unemployment compensation to make up some of the income lost since she stopped working March 11 on the advice of her doctor.

She had been driving for Uber and doing other self-employed freelance work that was the definition of the gig-work that the federal pandemic unemployment assistance had been written to include. But what she thought was an easy case in light of the coronavirus-driven shutdowns hit a snag that would require having a hearing.

That process has left Young, and thousands of others, in limbo with no safety net for months.

Workers who were not on the receiving end of a straightforward layoff, furlough or reduction in hours — confirmed quickly and easily by their employers — often find themselves facing a mini-trial, of sorts, to determine their eligiblity.

The hearings have been hamstrung, though, by short staffing, miscommunication with claimants and process changes that turned the pre-arranged conference calls into, now, a simple letter in the mail, in many cases, if the examiner can determine the result with fact-finding conducted prior.

As of this week, there were about 60 hearings officers on staff at the agency to handle about 55,000 claims. The state also hired a third-party vendor, Maximus, to supply additional fact-finders. After that, if a person or employer appeals a decision, it would go to a hearing overseen by, first, an appeals examiner. As of the end of June, there were just 17 full-time appeals examiners. If a decision is appealed, it goes to a special examiner, and there were only seven as of last month. At that time, appeal examiners were juggling 5,000 hearings that were waiting to be scheduled. The special examiners had a docket of 400 appeals to get through, according to VEC spokeswoman Joyce Fogg.

The rest of the tens of thousands of claims that require a determination have still been waiting to get into line.

In the case of claims involving people actively refusing to return to work because of pandemic risks, the state agency planned to task a third-party vendor to handle them. Until a determination is made in any of those cases, the workers don’t receive benefits.

While the Virginia Employment Commission has been able to hire hundreds of additional people to conduct fact-checking to hopefully streamline the hearing process, it can’t simply hire more examiners because the legal role can require at least six months of training or as much as a year, Fogg said.

As Young waits for some relief, she must deal with an immune deficiency that — in the best of times — still requires weekly plasma treatments to be able to interact safely with other people.

“I can be in the world as long as I’m taking treatments,” she said. Her doctor told her that if she caught COVID-19, “you’re done.”

Before the pandemic, Young was driving for ride-sharing companies and selling branded promotional materials on the side (things like the free pens and keychains one might get at a conference) as well as booking events for local food trucks. She chose those types of work knowing that if she became sick, she wouldn’t be letting anyone else down.

Yet, when she went to file for unemployment, thinking she would be “monetarily ineligible” — the first step before a person could be determined eligible for the new PUA benefits — the Virginia Employment Commission somehow tracked down a year-old job that lasted two months and that she left voluntarily. They paid her for that, but those benefits stopped after two weeks when the agency discovered she had left the job, something she never denied and readily admitted to when asked because she never expected to receive benefits from that job since she had long been working for herself.

Since then she had been in a seemingly never-ending and confounding back-and-forth with the state agency. Online, the system told her she was monetarily ineligible. But when she called VEC and managed to reach someone, they told her she was eligible but disqualified because she left her earlier position voluntarily, even though she had applied for benefits as someone who was, most recently, self-employed.

She would need a hearing, they said, before anything moved forward.

But that never happened. She had been told to wait for a phone call — not to schedule a hearing but to hold the hearing by phone. She had to make sure to answer every phone call, even the numerous telemarketing calls, just in case.

While she waited, she applied for the federal pandemic unemployment assistance directly once the system was set up in April. After hearing nothing for weeks, she applied again.

She called lawmakers and the staff at the Virginia Employment Commission, sending emails once she found a responsive staff member on the other end.

“You can’t blame them for getting snippy because they are probably way overworked,” she said of the VEC workers she’s contacted.

As of late June she was already a month and a half behind in rent. She had given up wine, but certainly not her sense of humor through it all. “That’s how I deal with everything,” she said.

Earlier this month she received two seemingly conflicting letters in the mail on the same day that would finally spell good news.

One said a hearing examiner had determined she was disqualified from receiving benefits from an earlier job she had left (something that was never in dispute) and another said she was eligible for the minimum weekly amount allowed. Instead of getting a hearing like she was told to wait for, the agency has shifted to trying to determine the facts and make a decision without a full-fledged live proceeding, and mailing a notice about the decision to the person.

Young’s first deposit arrived in her account a week later, and she’s since received the back pay in benefits she had been seeking all along. She paid her rent and caught up on her bills, just as the federal government’s extra $600 a week is expiring. “Until it is safe enough to venture back out,” she said, she’d also continue to try to sell promotional materials via email and phone calls. She recently discovered pens that might be primed for the pandemic with antibacterial grips that can be imprinted with a company logo on them.

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