Incarceration hold issue preventing people from receiving unemployment expected to be fixed by end of the week
150+ people contacted the I-Team about the issue
For thousands of Floridians, the fight for access to unemployment benefits isn t a problem of the past, but a plight that continues today.
and last updated 2021-04-23 18:28:51-04
BRADENTON, Fla. â For thousands of Floridians, the fight for access to unemployment benefits isn t a problem of the past, but a plight that continues today.
It s a problem the Florida Department of Economic Opportunity (DEO) has acknowledged but hasn t fixed, as financial situations for some families grow more desperate.
Takeaways from Tallahassee â Safety first
Safety first
While you might not know what EHS means, the profession and its functions in the workplace have been front-and-center for the past year.Â
The acronym stands for Environment, Health and Safety and covers everything from slip-and-falls to forklift accidents, carpal tunnel to workplace violence.Â
Before the COVID-19 crisis, The Florida Chamber had created a group designed to help propel the state to become one of the safest, healthiest, and most sustainable in the nation. The pandemic and its impact on every business in Florida highlight the critical importance of EHSâs purpose.
âThe Florida Chamber Safety Council tapped into Floridaâs leading companies and their safety leaders to create an Advisory Board that is an incubator of research, leadership and education, and provides resources, tools and best practices for small to mid-sized businesses that often do not have full-time safety, health and susta
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South Florida resident Judith Phillpotts is among them.
“It is very important, because I am a single paycheck and I have bills to pay,” Phillpotts said when asked about the benefits she was waiting on.
Phillpotts said she called NBC 6 Responds when her unemployment benefits suddenly stopped being processed at the end of December.
She told us she is still furloughed from her job in the travel industry, but her unemployment claim was halted due to a “Return to Work” error on her account.
“It seems to be a simple process, but for some reason it is a difficult thing on their side,” Phillpotts said.
The conversation with Deloitte on Monday was part of a meeting of the Florida Senate Select Committee on Pandemic Preparedness and Response.
Deloitte leaders said they re sympathetic to the challenges Floridians have and are still facing with unemployment during this pandemic.
When questioned by state legislators, Deloitte officials said the system was working well when it first launched in 2013 and was stress-tested to handle hurricanes and a financial crisis. But the pandemic caused a drastic spike in demand.
For almost a year, Spectrum News has been reporting extensively on the issues with the Florida Department of Economic Opportunity s CONNECT system, including delayed benefits and issues accessing the site.
The agency launched the latest review nearly 10 months ago at the directive of Gov. Ron DeSantis.
The report found Florida Department of Economic Opportunity ultimately overpaid for its CONNECT unemployment system; a system that was not properly designed nor tested.
“We determined that the requirements for system capacity, as outlined in the 2010 ITN, were never fully tested nor documented,” Inspector General investigators wrote in the preliminary report released Thursday. “The contract mandated system capacity for a minimum of 200,000 concurrent external users. We could not find evidence where DEO enforced this contract requirement. Deloitte’s stress testing documentation shows testing was for approximately 4,200 concurrent users (internal and external), the report continued. By not meeting contractual capacities, the CONNECT system was poorly positioned to handle unprecedented claim volume beginning in March/April 2020.”