Unemployment claims filed months ago still pending for thousands

So James Peden was ready to go when his appeal came up late last month, more than six months after he requested it.

Then he was surprised. Then he was exasperated. The appeals referee assigned to hear his case that morning wasn't there, because she'd left the job more than a month before.

In fact, she left two weeks before the state Division of Employment Security even reached out to give Peden his hearing date

Peden stood at the front desk in disbelief as a DES employee told him he'd have to call the appeals hotline – the number he'd already spent hours dialing and redialing – to schedule a new appointment.

"None of this makes sense to me," Peden recalled last week. "I show up, and the lady doesn’t even work there. I mean, I can’t make that up."

Peden's case may have been a one-off. DES spokeswoman Kerry McComber said the appeal was scheduled with a former referee in error, and it's the only instance DES knows of that happening. The division reached out to schedule a new March appeal date for Peden after WRAL News asked about his case.

But the process can be a long and winding one, even under the better conditions, as the state works out from under the avalanche of 3.4 million unemployment claims from 1.4 million people seeking help from multiple unemployment programs that rolled in over the last year.

A normal year, based on average claims filed from 2016 through 2019, would be less than 190,000 claims.

Since April of last year, 77,357 appeals like Peden's have been filed. Of those, there are about 30,000 still to be heard, and new appeals roll in regularly.

State law requires the appeals be heard by an attorney, and DES has about 90 of them, McComber said. That's 333 outstanding appeals per referee.

That data doesn't include appeals the state handles for Pandemic Unemployment Assistance, a federal program that expanded benefits to people who don't usually qualify, such as self-employed workers and independent contractors. McComber said that, as DES brought in new referees, it trained them to hear the PUA appeals first because they are often less complicated.

With the PUA backlog reduced, McComber said DES expects to make progress on the backlog from other programs soon.

Gov. Roy Cooper's team at DES has run seven different unemployment benefit programs over the last 11 months as various federal benefit boosts were layered onto the state's regular benefits program. It just added an eighth.

The state has paid more than $10 billion in claims since March of last year.

Peden said he understands all that, but he's been dealing with the system for 11 months. He lost his job in March 2020 and quickly applied for benefits. He went back to work in late June but never got an unemployment check for the time he missed.

He cannot calculate the time spent on a phone or a computer going back and forth with DES.

“I just feel like the whole process has been kind of like a zoo," he said.