Why people dread having to deal with bureaucracy and yet they vote for more government

They Filed for Unemployment Last Month. They Haven't Seen a Dime.

Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo has repeatedly promised to fix New York’s archaic unemployment-insurance system, which has been overwhelmed by an unprecedented wave of claims.

The state has partnered with Google to overhaul the online application, staffed call centers with thousands of additional workers and expanded their call-volume capacity, and vowed to address outstanding unemployment claims within 72 hours.

Carly Keohane has yet to benefit from any of those improvements.

Ms. Keohane, who lost her waitressing job in Rochester, N.Y., has been waiting a month to receive $2,124 in unemployment payments as a direct deposit into her bank account.

But the state instead told her that the money had been deposited on a state-issued debit card, which she never received. She cannot get anyone on the phone to find out where it is.

“I call the Department of Labor every single day, and I know the options by heart now,” said Ms. Keohane, 31, whose checking account was down to $10.35. “It would be OK if I just knew where the money was.”

As the coronavirus pandemic and near-nationwide stay-at-home orders exact an astonishing toll on the American economy, states’ unemployment systems have crateredunder a never-before-seen deluge of jobless claims. Over the past four weeks, about 22 million workers filed jobless claims, including about 1.2 million New Yorkers.

Unemployment systems, some of which rely on an antiquated computer programming language that has largely gone the way of dinosaurs, were not built for such a rush of claimants.

They also were not built for a new class of workers — independent contractors and the self-employed — now eligible for assistance during the pandemic.The results have been disastrous and maddening. Many people have had their online applications crash before they could hit submit, requiring them to start again from scratch. They have endured hourslong wait times over several days only to get randomly disconnected, or connected with representatives who say they cannot fix their issues.

In other states, including Kansas and Missouri, applicants say that they are still waiting for their unemployment payments to arrive, and that they have experienced long wait times on the phone, as well as busy signals, disconnections and error-prone online applications.

Without unemployment assistance, they have relied on friends, family and savings, if they have one, to survive.

For applicants in New York lucky enough to get through and submit a claim, some have been jolted awake at 2 a.m. by calls from the state’s Department of Labor seeking to confirm their identity.

Speaking in Albany on Thursday, the secretary to the governor, Melissa DeRosa, said the state had been staggering under the weight of more than one million claims for unemployment insurance, about four times the number of people who had lost jobs after the 2008 economic meltdown.

“We are going to continue doing everything we can to bring the system up to deal with this scale,” she said.Ms. Keohane was saving for a down payment on house. Instead, she has withdrawn all of her money to pay for groceries, as well as diapers and wipes for her 2-year-old son.

She has debated getting groceries from a food pantry but cannot bring herself to do it.

“It’s not right for me to have to go there,” she said. “There are people who are more needy than me.”

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