By State House News Service
A little over a month after Gov. Charlie Baker signed a law shoring up the unemployment system and reducing the premium increases facing employers to fund jobless benefits, lawmakers and administration officials are once again looking for a way to provide businesses relief from spiking costs.
The law Baker signed on April 1 authorized $7 billion in borrowing to stabilize the state's unemployment insurance trust fund, strained by a flood of joblessness during the COVID-19 pandemic, and limited the average rate hike to 18.5 percent instead of the nearly 60 percent increase employers would otherwise have to pay.
Some businesses soon found they were nonetheless facing dramatic increases in their unemployment tax payments, as one component of their UI costs, known as the solvency assessments, jumped from a rate of 0.58 percent in 2020 to 9.23 percent in 2021, surprising many.