From left, Jennifer Stevens, Lawrence Davis and Cheryl Jones are shown outside the Grant Sawyer State Office Building in Las Vegas on Friday, June 12, 2020, to protest failures at the Nevada Department of Employment, Training and Rehabilitation. The three were among two dozen who were calling for unemployment payments from the department.
Thursday, Jan. 28, 2021 | 9:42 p.m.
Nevada’s troubled unemployment benefits program has been overhauled, and a “tsunami” of claims spurred by pandemic layoffs have largely been sorted, officials said Thursday.
With unemployment office staff more than quadrupled, $8.3 billion in benefits paid out and some 300,000 families now receiving benefits, Elisa Cafferata, the new director of the Department of Employment, Training and Rehabilitation, said an oversight panel headed by former Democratic state lawmaker Barbara Buckley achieved its aim and will be dissolved.
Cafferata termed the effort “getting this process unstuck” and said the goal going forward is “getting people an answer and getting eligible claimants paid.”
Mark Thierman and Leah Jones, attorneys representing several independent contractors and self-employed workers in a lawsuit involving unpaid Pandemic Unemployment Assistance claims, were not convinced.
“They haven’t increased the number of people being paid,” Thierman said after reviewing Buckley's 38-page report recounting problems and offering recommendations. “They just did blanket denials — without due process, without facts and without letting people appeal.”
Buckley, a former state Assembly speaker, didn’t sugarcoat what she and eight panelists found after they were empowered by Gov. Steve Sisolak in August to rehabilitate the state's foundering jobless benefits program.
The department had been beset by widespread complaints about delays, disconnected calls and dropped cases — and Thierman's lawsuit that led a state court judge to fine the department in December for contempt of court. The fine was a symbolic $1,000.
“Key leadership positions in the department and the division were either filled with inexperienced leaders or vacant,” Buckley told reporters during a virtual news conference. “You can’t run an operation in crisis without steady accomplished leadership at the helm.”
Unemployment applications surged after casinos were closed in mid-March due to coronavirus restrictions. The department, with 181 employees, was “hit with unemployment numbers that have never been seen by any state, ever,” Cafferata said.
“That was followed by a tsunami of applications and unrelenting attacks by fraudulent actors,” she said.
Cafferata, formerly an administrator in the state Welfare and Support Services division, was named interim DETR director in August and permanent chief this week. The department’s former director, Heather Korbulic, who took the job in April, quit in June, citing death threats.
By then, state unemployment had shot up from an all-time low of 3.6% in February to the worst in the nation — 30.1% in April, a record jobless rate for any state. The jobless figure was back down to 9.2% in December, DETR said last week.
When Buckley was appointed in August, a backlog of applications approached 250,000, she said Thursday, including more than 26,000 unemployment insurance claims and more than 217,000 in the Pandemic Unemployment Assistance program.
Thierman and Jones said they believe 200,000 of the 217,000 claims that Buckley cited were simply rejected.
Their lawsuit argues the state improperly stopped $600 weekly benefits that Congress allocated as pandemic relief from reaching what Thierman called “multiple thousands” of so-called “gig workers” in Nevada.
Buckley said DETR officials were “certain that many — most — of the PUA claims were fraudulent,” but that careful review of applications caused delays and “legitimate Nevadans were caught in that pile.”
“More applications have been filed than are people in the state’s workforce,” Buckley said. “That means hundreds of thousands of fraudulent claims.”
Now, with 746 employees processing claims, Buckley said the backlog of regular unemployment insurance claims was reduced to “zero.”
Officials think the 16,874 PUA cases still pending may be fraudulent, she added, because proof of identity and supporting documents have not been submitted.
Buckley recommended that cases in that category that are not resolved by Feb. 7 be closed with what she termed a “mass resolve.”
