The Department has implemented 19 of the 21 recommendations from the state auditor.
By Morgan Rynor
Published: 7:34 PM PDT September 28, 2022
The state legislature held up a joint hearing on the Employment Development Department on Wednesday.
You may remember the EDD paid out billions of dollars in fraudulent claims, and then it became incredibly difficult for legitimate people to file their claims.
Is the EDD making progress? The short answer is, yes.
The EDD has since implemented 19 of the 21 recommendations the State Auditor’s Office gave them.
The meeting started off with Republican Assemblymember Tom Lackey holding up a large pile of audits they had sent to the EDD on how to improve their system, to which he says the legislature had minimal responses.
“We failed to protect taxpayer funds,” Lackey said.
So, what was the EDD’s response and update today? The State Auditor ran through a list of the changes they’ve made.
During the pandemic, the EDD elevated claims for manual review which takes a lot longer than electronic, so they put in an emergency processing tool.
The problem with that tool, however, is that there were relaxed eligibility criteria, which led to fraud. They fixed that.
They EDD also wasn’t paying attention to key data in the call center, like how often were problems resolved on the first call?
“EDD wasn’t paying attention to key data that would assist it in knowing how to improve its call center performance,” said acting Deputy State Auditor, Bob Harris. “Which is an industry standard metric for call centers that essentially tells you how often do you successfully assist a caller the first time they call you so that they don’t become a second or third or fourth time caller that relieves the frustration on the part of the claimant seeking assistance.”