Key Takeaways

Themes

Effective digital tools are highly desired

Dealing with the mail is frustrating and slow. Mail can get lost or sit for several days (or weeks during COVID) before getting delivered to the HR rep or being picked up from a closed office. This significantly reduces timeliness to respond to claims, and sometimes deadlines have already passed. HR reps also must manually compare these paper forms to (usually) digital employee records; they might scan all such claims forms for their records as well, and/or undertake other digital processes to keep track of paper claims, such as creating spreadsheets or emailing themselves digital copies of forms.

Digital UI service tools, where available, still presented challenges

Challenges range from a frustrating user experience (e.g., a lack of notifications, difficulty navigating the portals to complete tasks) to major functionality issues (e.g., forms that won’t download or open; incompatible data and files that force manual data entry, which is error prone; inability to complete some steps on certain browsers).

Additionally, companies operating in many states had to deal with separate portals for each state, which all function differently and can be hard to manage.

Attitudes about employees receiving UI varied across companies

Employees and Employers aren't inherently antagonists within the UI system: Participant 3's employer is already taxed at the highest rate for UI and actively provides advice and support to former employees to help them navigate the UI system; Participant 5 was told by their CEO that the employees should get benefits as much as possible.

On the other hand, Participant 1 was open about wanting to dispute claims, seeing it as his responsibility to the company, and Participant 6's company fires many employees for things that they believe are "cause" and ends up disputing many claims.

COVID Impact

Resources on fraud for employers are limited.

When asked, HR reps were interested in preventing fraud, but had few resources to do so other than maintaining solid payroll records and using these to compare accuracy of claims. Many relied on their personal knowledge of current and past employees to spot fraudulent claims. Several participants noted that they don't know how to mark a claim as fraudulent when they see it come through.

The backlogged systems impacted employers, too

• Participant 1 in GA hadn't gotten to the adjudication phase of any of the COVID-era contested claims at the time of the interview.

• Participant 2's company in MA didn't receive a bill for 4 months last summer

Notable quotes

“I decide what I contest, and I know what is and isn’t eligible. I don’t waste my time contesting claims I know I’m going to lose. ... and I’ve been right 100% of the time. It’s a huge error on my part to invest time if we aren’t going to win.” --Participant 1

“I don’t trust that DUA [in MA] is reading all the comments, and I feel like maybe something could slip through the cracks that would negatively impact an employee’s claim.” --Participant 2

“More than 95% [of this job] is just mail. Just paper, hundreds of pages. I’m not being sarcastic. Some of them are multiples of the same exact piece of paper coming in two different days, I’m trying to compare them. And then you have some states like AZ that’ll put three to four people in one envelope.” --Participant 3

“When I look at the website, it’s really hard to answer and get to my open claims. Filling them out with the paper is more effective as far as getting answers. Half the time I can’t see some of the claims that have been filed; I don’t think it’s me, I think it’s the website.” --Participant 4

“I would be grateful to have more resources from states on how to deal with fraudulent claims. I didn't even know how to fill out the form.” --Participant 5