PALM BEACH COUNTY, Fla. — Rose Lorenzo is one of more than a dozen people who reached out to us, reporting months-long wait times for assistance after losing their job.
Lorenzo was laid off from her job at a healthcare startup in October. After exhausting her one month’s severance payment, she applied for unemployment benefits in December.
She’s still waiting for an answer.
WATCH: WPTV asking why problems persist with Florida's unemployment program
“I still have not heard back on anything,” Lorenzo said. “I've gone down to the career source center. I've been trying to get through on the phone. I've been on phone wait times up to six hours.”
Lorenzo said she saw WPTV’s reporting on Florida’s unusually low recipiency rate for unemployment benefits compared to other states, and felt compelled to share her concerns publicly.
“I think they have a flawed system,” she said. “They need to look at servicing, you know, the residents of Florida. I think they need to be more concerned about that. There's got to be something that changes with that system.”
WATCH PREVIOUS COVERAGE: Woman waiting months for benefits receives payment after WPTV report
WPTV’s repeated attempts to get answers directly from FloridaCommerce, which administers the Reemployment Assistance program, have been unsuccessful.
However, public records reveal a pattern of systemic issues with the program dating back to before the Covid-19 pandemic, and raise doubts over whether those issues have been resolved.
According to records kept by the Florida Auditor General, the most recent audit involving the Reemployment Assistance program was completed in March of 2021.
Auditors that year examined the IT infrastructure of the Claims and Benefits Information System and found, “many of the findings disclosed in prior audits of the system, most recently in our report (from 2019), remain uncorrected.”
Among the 14 findings cited in the 2021 audit were:
- Documents being improperly indexed and, in some cases, purged
- Processing errors dating back to 2014, without a solution
- Claim notices not being sent to employers in a timely manner
- Over-payments of benefits
Many of the finding, auditors wrote, could lead to inaccurate and untimely processing of claims.
In its official response to the 2021 audit, the Department of Economic Opportunity, which later became FloridaCommerce, concurred with the auditors’ findings and blamed many of the delays in fixing years-old issues on the Covid-19 pandemic.
The response listed target dates to solve the problems, ranging from later in 2021 to June of 2023.
There’s no record of a follow-up audit.
WPTV asked FloridaCommerce via email about whether any of these system issues have been fixed, and what exactly is contributing to the issues people are currently experiencing. A spokesperson said last week she was “looking into this,” but did not follow through with information or respond to repeated follow-up emails.
In 2021, Florida lawmakers passed legislation to reform the Department of Economic Opportunity and Governor Ron DeSantis signed it, setting into motion a years-long modernization project for the reemployment assistance program that included monthly and quarterly progress reports.
The last published report is from June of 2024.
While it found the technology was much more secure than it was in 2021 (multiple security risks were noted in that audit), the progress report said the program’s finances were not being managed properly, and some of the modernization projects had not been completed.
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Woman waiting months for benefits receives payment after WPTV report
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