State unveils ‘new and innovative’ update to unemployment system

New Jersey needed “a new and innovative way of reimagining the entire experience” of applying for jobless benefits, said Rob Asaro-Angelo, the state’s labor commissioner. (Photo courtesy of New Jersey Governor's Office)

New Jersey’s unemployment application process has received a major upgrade, four years after millions of claims filed during the pandemic stressed the archaic system.

The new process is a major improvement for people applying for unemployment insurance, state and federal officials told reporters Tuesday. Labor officials said the enhancements are a culmination of the state’s participation in a federal pilot program, feedback directly from claimants seeking jobless claims, and much-needed funding from the feds.

Among the improvements to the application:

• The ability to save and return to it later without losing progress.

• Changes to questions, with 77% reworded or removed from the application.

• Revised wording on complex questions to make it easier to understand and accurately answer.

• A Spanish-language application made with feedback from native Spanish speakers.

• A mobile-friendly format.

• A new, personalized home page that addresses a claimant’s current situation and recommends next steps.

Along with the overhauled application process, there’s also a new call center that officials say will dramatically reduce wait times. Officials also said that emails will include simpler language instead of complicated jargon.

The complaints about the state’s archaic unemployment system were nothing new — labor officials have been arguing for money to modernize the claims process since the early 2000s. But the flood of claims during the pandemic put a spotlight on how badly the system needed an upgrade, which acting federal Secretary of Labor Julie Su addressed Tuesday.

“Unemployment insurance — like a house with a leaky roof — should be fixed during good times, when there’s sunshine, because you can’t replace a damaged roof in the middle of a storm,” said Su. “For unemployment insurance systems throughout the country, the COVID-19 pandemic was an unprecedented storm.”

The new site has been active for about a month. The upgrades have led to reduced errors, an increase in people verifying their identity, and a decrease in the need for human intervention to process claims, officials said.

Gov. Phil Murphy said it became clear modernization would be needed by the early days of the pandemic, when unemployment systems across the country buckled under the weight of a sudden torrent of applicants and amid changing federal guidelines. That pushed these outdated systems to their breaking point, Murphy said Tuesday.

Within the first two months of the pandemic, more than 1 million jobless claims were filed in New Jersey, a staggering number compared to the roughly 100,000 filed weekly before the Murphy administration started issuing orders in March 2020 that shuttered many businesses.

During 2020 and 2021, claimants waited weeks or months to receive their benefits. The website claimants used would freeze. Some people saw their accounts suddenly frozen. Others had to reach out to the state’s call center, which was inundated with questions from other frustrated and confused claimants. Even if some claimants called in the early morning or dozens of times a day, applicants were told to call back the next day, and often had trouble reaching a live person.

Legislative offices became de facto liaisons between the Department of Labor and struggling residents, recalled Sen. Declan O’Scanlon (R-Monmouth), whose office helped resolve thousands of claims. He said if the new website works as promised, he’ll give “a big standing ovation to the labor commissioner and the administration.”

“They are going at many of the things that caused the tremendous problems and nightmares that our unemployed residents faced,” O’Scanlon said. “It sounds like they heard much of what the public had to say, and what we had to say.”

Officials on Tuesday said they have met with dozens of applicants over the last few years in coffee shops, libraries, and community centers to locate places in the application process where people got stuck, like poorly worded questions or trouble accessing the unemployment application on mobile devices.

“This wasn’t just a technology program that can be remedied by a new set of computers or an off-the-shelf program, but a new and innovative way of reimagining the entire experience. We’re completely flipping the status quo,” said Rob Asaro-Angelo, the state’s labor commissioner.

Although labor officials are making all these modernizations, the unemployment system still relies on a mainframe using COBOL, a programming language created in the 1950s. They maintain that COBOL withstood the increased traffic during the pandemic, and that the new system can handle a deluge of claims similar to the one seen in 2020.

“We do want to replace it. We have been actively working now for years on that, but we’re doing that in parallel with these public resident-facing improvements so that we’re not beholden to the longer project timelines I’ve seen when they tried to do everything at once,” said Dave Cole, the state’s chief innovation officer.

Su said New Jersey has received nearly $25 million in federal dollars — about half dedicated to upgrades, and the other funding for fraud protection and equity grants. New Jersey is a blueprint for 18 other states that will also undergo a modernization process, she added.

She said federal and state officials underwent a piecemeal approach to upgrading New Jersey’s system instead of a wholesale overhaul that would have required shutting the system down. The modular system will also allow the state to make changes as the need arises, officials said. And the source code is shareable for other states to use.

While Asaro-Angelo has previously advocated for a collaborative system between all 50 states, Su said each state has its own set of rules and requirements. The plan is not to develop something that’s uniform for each state, but to have shared learned lessons, she said.

“It’s almost like a Lego — if you imagine it as pieces that fit together but can also be changed in order to build the system that’s needed in particular states,” she said. “So we don’t imagine one uniform system, but our goal has always been to provide tools and a network of sharing so that certain things that should be done nationally, there are tools for that too.”

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