More than 60 state lawmakers sent a furious letter to Gov. Gavin Newsom on Wednesday demanding action to correct the failures at the state’s woefully dysfunctional Employment Development Department.
“It is unacceptable that millions of Californians have gone for months without income due to the failure of our state government,” they wrote, “We would appreciate a timely response from your Administration on all of the issues raised in this letter.”
Among the issues: 1.13 million claims for unemployment benefits have yet to be paid. Lawmakers were recently told, after months of seeking answers, that the agency believes it can resolve 239,000 of those claims by the end of September.
The end of September is obviously a totally unacceptable time frame for the payment of owed benefits that are desperately needed by people who have been thrown out of work. As for the other 900,000 claims, EDD offered no estimate at all.
At a recent oversight hearing in the state Assembly, EDD Director Sharon Hilliard said it would take her agency up to 20 weeks to reprogram its computers to pay benefits after Congress approves new federal supplements to state unemployment checks.
One reason for this is the failure of the EDD’s information technology modernization project. EDD’s computers are 30 years old and they run COBOL, a programming language that is 60 years old. The lawmakers noted that most of the programmers who know COBOL have retired, and EDD is “the last California state agency to rely on it.”
Lawmakers called for “vendor reform and accountability,” complaining that EDD has “a very poor history of engaging with the private sector to modernize and upkeep its IT systems, continuing to mostly default to its long-standing relationship with its consultant Deloitte.”
Ten years ago, Deloitte was given a $47 million initial contract to upgrade EDD’s IT systems within four years. After six years, the project had ballooned to $94 million and “never solved basic problems.” According to the state auditor in 2015, project leaders had misrepresented that the project was 99 percent complete, when in fact another $53 million worth of work remained to be done.
In 2016, a modernization program was begun with a scheduled completion date 11 years later.
The lawmakers wrote that Deloitte has received a total of $259 million to work on the EDD’s IT systems over the years. That includes two no-bid contracts during the COVID-19 pandemic.
The result of this taxpayer investment has become painfully obvious. More than a million Californians are without their much-needed unemployment benefits, unable to get through on the phone. Worse, when they do get through to someone on the phone, many are receiving incorrect information, or they’re told to call their state representative, or the EDD employees hang up on them.
The outrage is bipartisan and growing.
One Sacramento television station reached out to Newsom for a reaction to the lawmakers’ letter. “The governor would not go on camera,” KCRA 3 reported, “His staff referred us to the Department of Labor.”
That’s not good enough. Newsom announced a “strike force” to address EDD’s tech issues, but that’s not good enough, either. EDD needs ground-up reform. Californians deserve better than to have their government hang up on them.
