On Monday, November 2nd at 5 p.m., the State of New York will implement a new unemployment insurance processing platform that will bring the unemployment process for individuals and businesses out of the ’70s and into the modern age. To better understand what’s at stake, Rockefeller Institute President Bob Megna interviews New York State Department of Labor Commissioner Roberta Reardon on this episode of Policy Outsider.
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Joel Tirado 00:02
Welcome to Policy Outsider presented by the Rockefeller Institute of Government. I’m Joel Tirado. On Monday, November 2nd at 5 p.m., the State of New York will implement a new unemployment insurance processing platform that will bring the unemployment process for individuals and businesses out of the 70s and into the modern age. To better understand what’s at stake, Rockefeller Institute President Bob Megna interviews New York State Department of Labor Commissioner Roberta Reardon on this episode of Policy Outsider. That conversation is up next.
Robert Megna 00:51
On today’s show, we’re talking to Roberta Reardon, commissioner of the Department of Labor, and about the new unemployment system, why the upgrade was necessary, and what people who use the system need to know. We want them to stay eligible, of course, if they’re already eligible for unemployment insurance benefits. But first, let’s welcome the commissioner and say thank you for coming. Thank you so much. It’s such a pleasure to be here. Great. Thanks, commissioner. Why don’t we start by talking about the key information people who use the platform now need to know? And maybe you could explain the platform itself and how it’s supposed to work.
Roberta Reardon 01:41
So this is the largest upgrade of any unemployment insurance system in The United States ever. It is a really big deal. This is coming out of a very old system. Our current system was built in the late seventies. For those who are listening who know what COBOL is, most people have no idea that was its original coding. And it has… It’s, on prem mainframe computer unable to scale, which we learned during the pandemic. And this has been underway for a decade. Actually, before I came to the DOL, they were already engaging in the in the start of this process. By 2019, we we put out the RFPs in 2017. By 2019, we had a vendor on-site. They were starting to work. 2020, a little thing called the pandemic happened, and our poor system shuttered and stopped many times. But they kept working on the on the news… New system. We learned a lot from the pandemic. We learned that it needed to be in the cloud, not on the on the ground, and we knew that we… Our customers expected more transparency. The customer expectation was very different in 2020 than it had been even six years before in the design, so we were able to change that. And now we’re ready to go live. It is a really big exercise. So as you can imagine, we’re transitioning over 5,000,000,000 business records from the old system into the new system. And in order to do that, you have to take the current system offline for a period of time to do it correctly. So the dates to remember, November 2, which is a Monday at 5PM. The New York State unemployment system will become unavailable to the public. You will not be able to certify. You will not be able to file a new claim. You will not be able to go into your account. That lasts for nine to twelve days. At the end of that time, we will have a big notification to everybody. Customers can come back, go into the new system, certify or file a new claim in the new system, and we’re off to the races. So what are we doing in that time? The first three days after November 2, we’re processing all the claims that came in that previous weekend, wrapping up business. If you’ve gone in and done your certification before 5PM on November 2, your claim is processed and your money will land in your bank account as it usually does, usually by the end of the week. If you miss that date and you you can’t go in and certify until the new system is back up, you will not lose that week. Everybody will be made whole as soon as the new system is back up, so don’t worry about losing any time. Everybody will get all that they are legally owed through the system. This includes businesses as well. Businesses also will not be able to go into their accounts. They also have to wait. The great thing about the new system other than it’s new is, you will be able to use your smartphone to certify, to file claims, to upload documents. The whole process can be done from a smartphone, which we couldn’t do in the old system. It’s much more transparent. We have a thing that we like to call the pizza tracker, which tells you where you are in your application process, and it will also say when your when your claim is paid. So you won’t have to call us to say, where’s my money? It will be right there in your account available for you to look at. The new system does a wonderful thing for us. In the old system, you could go in and start a new claim and if you didn’t have the information that we needed, the old system would allow you to go ahead and put the claim in as if it were going to be paid. It would immediately be kicked out by the computer and that meant that your claim took weeks longer to to go through. The new system prompts you to fill out every piece of the application. You can’t really go forward until you fill it all out. However, in the new system, it saves your information. So if you’ve got everything but one piece of information, you save it, you go away, you get the information, you come back, you put it in, and it continues to go. It is… We’re gonna have much cleaner data because of the way the system operates. It’s much more modern. And one difference for people who are certifying, the certification process is basically the same information except that there will be a place in your weekly certification where you are asked to list three work search attempts in the past week. And it’s a drop down menu and you can click on them and give some moderate amount of information and move on. Most people have to do work search anyway. Now you can do it right in your certification. During the period when you’re not able to certify the nine to twelve days, if you’re already in the system, please keep a record of your work search because you will be asked to put that into your new certification. Again, when you go into certify the new system, you will not lose any weeks. You can backdate to the appropriate date that, you know, that you missed because of this upgrade. For businesses, twenty four seven access. They no longer have to wait for us to be in the office to go work on their on their account. They can have third parties get access to their account and go in and and work on their behalf. We will have a much cleaner interface with businesses. We will send… We need documentation from you, Bob, and we’ll send you a message in the system. You’ll send that information back to us through the system. No more faxes. No more downloading of forms and filling them out. It’ll all be right there, much faster, much cleaner, much better data. I think the thing that excites me most about the new system is that it has the capacity to be continually upgraded because we know laws change, regulations change, the world of work is changing, AI is going to perhaps change the way people work. The new system can be upgraded and adjusted while it runs. The old system, you had to shut everything down for a number of days in order to change anything. Now think of it as a a chest of drawers. You pull out one drawer, you work on that drawer, the rest of it works seamlessly. So we can continually upgrade. Security is much better than it was before. I’m very happy to say that even now with the old system, we catch about 97% of attempted fraud before money goes out. In the new system, we’ll have even better security and the ability to do a lot of research and data that will help us identify better who’s trying to do this. So more secure information, cleaner data, easier process for the customers, and better access for businesses.
Robert Megna 08:22
That all sounds fantastic, actually. I I may be one of the few people who remembers COBOL programming, so I I understand how you’d wanna do the updates now. Is there any… Should people that are on the system, either on the business side or on the benefit side, be worried that they’re somehow gonna get dropped during this transition?
Roberta Reardon 08:49
No. The short answer is no. We have done a tremendous amount of testing, more testing than our vendor recommended actually because we want to make sure for that very reason we don’t want anything to disrupt this process for our very important customers. And all the tests that, you know, we test, we fix, we test, we fix. Now we’re just testing because it’s coming back really strong. We’ve load tested. We’ve we’ve tried way more than the number of people in the current system, so we know that we’re ready. We know it’s technology. There will be an occasional glitch that we haven’t mapped out yet, but that hopefully will be a small fix, not anything major. And we’re ready. We’re gonna have extra people on board when we go back live because we know that there’s gonna be an anxious public. We understand that. One of the things we’re trying to do is help customers have access to their benefits without having to call and talk to us. People are busy. They’re… They’ve got very busy lives. They’re trying to find a new job. They don’t wanna take time out to wait on the phone to talk to a human being. We want this… The system to be able to service their needs quickly and efficiently. And that’s one of the real drivers of the design of this. You know, it is built to answer your question before you need a human being. And if you need a human being, which people do, we will have those well trained people ready, but they will be ready for the people who really need them. One other thing, you can certify or file a new claim on the phone, but it is slower because you’re talking to a human. It is actually much more efficient to use the online process. So I urge people, please do that. It actually helps you get your information into the system and then go about your day.
Robert Megna 10:38
Thanks for that. What, since this has been an issue for a while, what what really was the motivating factor that pushed you to this is now the time we need to do this and get this done?
Roberta Reardon 10:53
So before I became commissioner, there had been several attempts to modernize. This is a nationwide problem. All states have old COBOL processors, you know, old mainframe on prem, old technology. And, you know, a friend of mine told me once when I bought my first, you know, it was a Mac desktop computer. We were so worried that we wouldn’t have the best thing, and Terry said, buy the best one you can afford because I can guarantee you the minute you put your credit card down, they’ll improve that system. And it’s true. Technology changes much more rapidly than, you know, the make of your car or the color of paint on your wall. So we needed to make… We knew that we were woefully out of date. Our data was not the cleanest data in the world because it was very old. We had a lot of… I called them barnacles, little fixes that have been attached to the machine over the years. And it just was not an efficient way to do business. The public, this is the thing we really learned from the pandemic, the public expects more. If you can order socks on Amazon and they’re in your in your vestibule the next day, why does it take me six weeks to to talk to the government? And that’s a valid complaint. So we are simply trying to meet our customers where they are. That is a really important mantra for us at the DOL. You shouldn’t have to fit into my DOL box in order to get service. We should be able to help you from wherever you are, whatever your issue is. We have language accessibility issues. We, you know, these… The new system is adjustable for people who use readers if they are visually impaired. We have a lot of things to help people because we understand it’s not a cookie cutter world. New York State’s a very diverse state, and we need to meet all of those people wherever they are.
Robert Megna 12:45
Great. You know, people today are worried about how fast technology is advancing. Why should they not worry about the changes that you’re making? Making? What are the protections that you have in place to make sure that everyone will feel comfortable?
Roberta Reardon 13:06
So again, we have really tested this. The the vendor recommended a certain amount of testing. We went way beyond what they had suggested because we wanted we wanted to be assured that our customers would be served the way we wanted them to be served. And the results I think are really secure. It is… We we have an awesome responsibility. We have to secure your very important personal information. That was one thing during the pandemic. The fraud that we experienced was a new kind of fraud. People bought people’s personal identification off the dark web and then used it to file a false claim. So we understood that we really had to change the way our security was built. That’s when we got ID. Me, which is the the visual, security. We also have other forms of security. We do a lot of data analytics now that will identify… I can’t talk about a lot of it because it will tell them what we’re using, but you know, we can tell we can tell if somebody’s trying to file from another country. We can tell certain… There are certain banks that we discovered during the pandemic that were iffy and they and they at least flag the the claim to really be looked at. So we take all of that very seriously. We understand this is a lifeline when you’re out of work. I was an actor, you know, before I became the commissioner. I was on unemployment and I remember, particularly as a young actor, that check was important. So I get it And, you know, that’s why we’re doing so much information up front. If you’re already in the system, when you go into certify the last five weeks before the upgrade, you will see a video. You have to see a video about the upgrade before you can go in and certify your weekly benefits. We’re sending emails and texts to everybody in the system. This is coming. We will send more emails and texts when it’s ready to have people come back in. We have the live billboards in Monahan in Moynihan Station in New York City. We’re doing podcasts like yours. I’ve done over 30 interviews already and there’s more coming because you can never over communicate. And I want the message to be very clear. November 2 at 05:00, certify before that. Then nine to twelve days, the system will not be available, but it will come up and be ready for you as a new system. During that time, keep track of your work search efforts. And, of course, the career centers will be open for virtual appointments. So if you want to if you want to work on your resume or do mock interviews, we can do all of that virtually. Don’t worry about that. Continue your careers path for you to work, and then when the system is ready, come back in and certify.
Robert Megna 15:41
That all sounds great, commissioner. One final thing maybe. It sounds like you’re ahead of the curve with what other states around the country are doing. Is that something, you think about and and are trying to, you know, keep New York in the lead?
Roberta Reardon 16:02
Bob, we’re New York. We’re always number one. Yes. I mean, it has… A lot of states are in the same in the same position, and and a lot… We’re working very closely with a lot of states who are watching how did you do it, how does it… You know, some states have tried to do piecemeal. We’re gonna improve the phone center and then we’re gonna improve the back end. You know, they they break it apart. We’re one of the very… We’re probably the only one that’s done complete redo stem to stern. So there’s a lot of attention on this. These systems are everywhere. The federal government has old mainframe COBOL based systems for Social Security. And lots of towns and counties have the same thing everywhere in the country. So, there’s a lot of attention on it. It is… People have said, why haven’t you done it before? As you can tell, it’s a very time intensive. It took us a decade, start to finish, to to get this project imagined, bid, built, tested, now ready for the public. It’s a very expensive operation, but it’s what people need. At the end of the day, again, if you’re gonna order, you know, your, you know, toilet paper from an online service, why can’t you get online with your business, with your, state government?
Robert Megna 17:21
Great. Well, thank you commissioner for this great, explanation of the new system. We’re glad to have you, do this for us. Anything you wanna leave us with?
Roberta Reardon 17:33
Our website, dol.ny.gov/unemployment, there’s a a load of information. We’re redoing the website. We will be refreshing pages during the time that the system is unavailable. Please go there and explore all the opportunities that are there. We are the government and we are here to help and use our website first. Thank you, Commissioner. Thank you.
Joel Tirado 18:02
Thanks again to New York State Department of Labor Commissioner Roberta Reardon and Rockefeller Institute President Bob Megna for that conversation. If you liked this episode, please rate, subscribe, and share. It will help others find the podcast and help us deliver the latest in public policy research. All of our episodes are available for free wherever you stream your podcasts and transcripts are available on our website. I’m Joel Tirado; until next time.
Policy Outsider is presented by the Rockefeller Institute of Government, the public policy research arm of the State University of New York. The Institute conducts cutting-edge nonpartisan public policy research and analysis to inform lasting solutions to the challenges facing New York state and the nation. Learn more at rockinst.org or by following RockefellerInst. That’s i n s t on social media. Have a question comment or idea? Email us at [email protected].
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