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Hundreds of Thousands of Calls to Missouri Unemployment Office Went Unanswered in April
Missouri's unemployment office allowed 120,000 calls to go unanswered on two separate days in April, at a critical time for workers amidst the coronavirus pandemic. According to emails obtained by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, the office was overwhelmed with calls during the spring and summer while also dealing with online system outages.
Top officials with the Missouri Division of Unemployment Security were frustrated with the outages and inability to answer the calls, according to the emails. The division also pulled in workers from other departments to try to handle the increased call volume.
The emails reveal that the state was answering around 20,000 calls a day in April. But on at least four days, more than 100,000 calls to the unemployment help line were deflected, meaning they were not answered by a real person. And after two days of experiencing more than 120,000 deflected calls per day, the phone system went completely offline for three hours.
The phone issues were compounded by problems with the state's online employment portal, UInteract. The system, which has been in operation since 2016, enables workers to file jobless claims online. It was not able to keep up with the number of claims being filed, however, and went down for several hours in June because of the large volume of emails the state received. It also experienced sporadic outages and slow responsiveness in July, due to "network-related issues," according to the emails.
The call center scheduling issues continued, despite the unemployment office pulling in workers from other departments to help. The emails reveal that average wait times at the state's call centers rose from under five minutes in March to over an hour by June.
At the end of July, the state finally signed a $9 million emergency contract with Ernst & Young to set up a 125-person call center to help with the backlog of unemployment claims. As part of the contract, the consulting firm is also reviewing Missouri's unemployment system and website and making improvement suggestions.
The new call center has helped the state catch up on its backlog, and by August 28 no calls to the unemployment division went unanswered. The state also reported the number of claims filed had dropped from 440,000 at the end of April to 200,000 in October.
Missouri is far from the only state to become inundated with unemployment calls. An independent audit revealed only 0.5 percent of unemployment calls to the Wisconsin Department of Workforce Development were answered during the height of the pandemic, between March 15 and June 30. And Hawaii was forced to open a new call center to handle the influx of unemployment claims it has been receiving.
Edited by Maurice Nagle