Stimulus extends unemployment benefits. Tens of thousands in NC may still be left out.
The new stimulus bill offers jobless Americans another 10 weeks of unemployment benefits, but that may not help the tens of thousands of North Carolina residents who have already been left out of the program.
The Pandemic Unemployment Assistance program, established by the federal CARES Act, was Kat Ham and Aaron Helfgott’s last hope.
Back in March, Helfgott left his job at a Circle K gas station — he has a congenital heart issue that puts him at risk of severe COVID-19 complications.
Ham, his fiancée who had left her job at a communications company in November due to a mental health crisis, was just starting to look for work again. But her doctor advised her to stay home, too, due to her asthma and COPD. She also worried about bringing the virus back to the small Raleigh house she shares with Helfgott and her 11-year old daughter, Charlie, who has a heart murmur and other underlying conditions.
The two quickly applied for unemployment and started receiving benefits in March. For the weeks they received the federal $600 supplement, they managed fine. But once that program ended, they struggled to live off Ham’s $127 a week and Helfgott’s $93 in state benefits.
They fell behind on their bills, leaned on family and friends, and started making deliveries for Doordash and Postmates using the car they share. That brought in around $40 a day between the two of them.
It wasn’t enough. After a couple of months missed rent, the couple received several eviction notices. They were approved for state rental assistance through the HOPE program — but the other bills piled up. By the end of September, their phone company began intermittently shutting off their service until they’d put together enough to pay some of the bill.
And then, the checks stopped coming. They had used up their maximum number of weeks of state unemployment benefits, plus two federal extensions established through the CARES Act.
When state unemployment runs out
People who exhaust their state unemployment are potentially eligible for PUA, a federal program set up to assist gig workers and self-employed people, and people who have used up state benefits.
Over half a million people have applied for PUA in North Carolina, according to the Division of Employment Security — 37% of the total number of people who’ve applied for unemployment benefits of any kind since the start of the pandemic.
The program is unprecedented, offering relief to people typically excluded from unemployment benefits. But it has stricter eligibility requirements than state unemployment: people can only receive it if they are out of work for one of several COVID-19 related reasons. They include being diagnosed with COVID-19, quitting or losing their job if their workplace closed as a “direct result” of COVID-19, or being the primary caregiver for a child who can’t attend school because of COVID-19. Claimants have to re-certify and be re-approved each week.
“It’s ridiculous. If a parent had to stay home with their kid who can’t go to school and then four months later the daycare opens, it’s not like that parent can just go back to work,” said Michele Evermore, a senior analyst at the National Employment Law Project.
Helfgott and Ham both applied for PUA in November. Both had uploaded doctor’s letters attesting that their underlying conditions made working too risky.
They didn’t hear anything for weeks. Then in December, both received denial letters from DES, which said they were ineligible for PUA because they were not out of work due to COVID-19.
To Helfgott and Ham, this determination didn’t make any sense.
“It seems like every time we turn around, the programs that were meant for us aren’t really meant for us,” said Helfgott. “I’m approved, then I’m denied, and the money’s coming, then the money doesn’t come. And the bills are still coming and it’s — it’s horrible.”
As Christmas approached, the couple spent a day making deliveries for Doordash to make enough to buy Charlie a few presents from Walmart and the Dollar Tree.
“I feel like my hands are tied behind my back where I can’t go out and work and I can’t get unemployment — so how am I supposed to live?” said Ham.
Many PUA applicants found ineligible
Of the more than 500,000 people who’ve applied for PUA in North Carolina since the end of March, 140,000 have been found ineligible, said Kerry McComber, spokesperson for DES. Just under half of the applicants — 248,000 — have been found eligible for at least one week.
By comparison, the overall average approval rate for all unemployment programs in the state is 67%.
DES declined to comment on Ham and Helfgott’s cases. But on Dec. 23, the day after The News & Observer sought comment, DES reopened their claims and approved them both for PUA. Ham and Helfgott said they never got a straight explanation about the reversal, either.
“If somebody denies you so quickly and then all the sudden you’re approved so quickly, it’s kind of like, why didn’t that happen in the first place?” said Ham. “It’s almost bittersweet.”
‘Lowest benefits in the country’
Across the country, state unemployment offices struggled to ramp up the PUA program from scratch in the early months of the pandemic.
Typically, states have two years to comply with any federal unemployment policy changes, compared with the two weeks they got to set up PUA, said Evermore. The challenges were especially acute, she said, because “we ignore the unemployment system when times are good, so [states] just had no capacity to stand up these new systems.”
That was particularly true in North Carolina, where major budget cuts to the state unemployment agency by Republican legislators in 2013 left the agency understaffed, according to local experts. In mid-April, DES announced it would triple its staff to meet the surge in unemployment claims, from about 500 to more than 1,600.
In 2013, the state also cut the maximum number of state unemployment benefit weeks from the nationwide standard of 26 to a range of 12 to 20 depending on the unemployment rate.
That decision has had big consequences for PUA: the sooner claimants exhaust state benefits, the sooner they are potentially eligible for PUA.
In a statement to The N&O, Dory MacMillan, a spokesperson for Gov. Roy Cooper, said the “legislature should increase the value and length of state unemployment benefits, which are the lowest in the country.”
In North Carolina in the week ending Dec. 26, there were roughly the same number of initial claims made for PUA as for state unemployment insurance: 8,080 claims were for state unemployment and 8,097 were for PUA, according to data from the federal Department of Labor.
That same week nationwide, on the other hand, the number of initial state unemployment claims was more than two and a half times the number of initial PUA claims: 841,111 were for state unemployment and 302,262 were for PUA.
Thousands of claims pending
Even as the new federal stimulus extends PUA, thousands in North Carolina await approval or denial for claims filed in the program’s first round.
According to DES, 17,712 people had a pending PUA claim on Dec. 23. That was more than double the number of people who had a claim for state benefits pending that day — 8,289 — despite the fact that PUA claims make up just over a third of all unemployment claims filed in North Carolina since the start of the pandemic.
Both Ham and Helfgott’s PUA claims were pending for weeks before they received denial letters. The two called and emailed DES repeatedly for an explanation or an update.
“You talk to one person at the same place and you talk to another person and it’s a completely different story,” said Ham.
Sen. Wiley Nickel, a Democrat who represents Wake County, said he’s heard many complaints about the cumbersome process.
“Like anything, when you have a system that’s designed to accommodate a small number of people and you have hundreds of thousands, it’s hard to make it work as well as it should,” Nickel said.
Ham joined a Facebook group for unemployed people in North Carolina with over a thousand members and found many others experiencing the same frustrations.
Navigating the unemployment system has turned into a “full time job,” she said, that’s “literally in your mind 24/7: Are we going to survive today? Are we going to be able to make our bill for our phone so we can communicate with unemployment?”
According to McComber, the communication issues stem from the “massive volume of claims and increased complexity of claims” during the pandemic and the agency’s now managing six new federal unemployment programs. The new federal COVID-19 relief law will require implementing additional federal benefits and extensions, McComber said.
Nickel and other Democratic legislators plan to push for expanding and extending state benefits when they return in January. The state already has the money for these changes, said Nickel, noting that the state’s unemployment insurance trust fund had around $4 billion in it before the pandemic, and still has close to $2.6 billion today.
“We could increase benefits a lot and it wouldn’t cost taxpayers a cent,” said Nickel. “We have the money to do it, and I’m just hoping that we can convince Republican leadership to help throw jobless workers a lifeline.”
In the meantime, with the new stimulus package promising an additional $300 per week tacked on to benefits, including PUA, delays and mistaken denials will cost jobless North Carolinians even more.
With the extra $300 on the way, Ham bought Charlie some extra Christmas presents: a Harry Potter LEGO set and new watercolors. Once the payments come in, the couple will be able to repay friends and family who helped them with bills.
“I’ll feel so much better once we pay them back,” said Ham. But she remains perplexed by a system that left them with no choice but to borrow in the first place. “So many other people need help too.”
This story was originally published January 4, 2021 at 5:30 AM.
