Benefit recipients get paid after KOIN 6 sheds light on Oregon Employment Department delays
PORTLAND, Ore. (KOIN) — After a deluge of stories about Oregonians struggling to get lifelines in the form of paid leave or unemployment insurance benefits, a glimmer of hope has now surfaced for many of the people who sat down with KOIN 6 News in recent weeks to share their story.
This all comes after the Oregon Employment Department transitioned its online unemployment insurance system in early March into Frances Online, which had been used to process paid leave for eligible recipients in the state.
People have been sending KOIN 6 heartbreaking emails for weeks now, saying they were spending hours on hold, getting calls dropped and receiving little to no responses back from OED about their delayed payments. In many instances, their cases were escalated within the system.
KOIN 6 has now received word from some people who we profiled that they’ve now gotten paid soon after our reports went public.
April Harvey, an unemployment insurance recipient whom KOIN 6 previously profiled, told us she doesn’t think she would’ve gotten paid if it weren’t for our report.
“No, no, I think it would have been a lot more, a lot longer and a lot more arduous," said Harvey, who mentioned she was living off of a credit card to survive due to the delay.
She added that she doesn't think it should be necessary for people to contact the media for their applications to go through.
"It's very out of balance. That should not be the course of action that people have to make," Harvey said.
Corina Thompson, a paid leave recipient whom we similarly profiled, said she originally reached out to KOIN 6 due to being at her "wit's end because of no pay."
“And it really took you guys to reach out to paid leave and — got paid the next day," Thompson said.
OED acknowledged that high traffic has made it tough for people to connect through the usual channels. They also said they don't speak publicly about all of the options to escalate cases because it threatens to overwhelm the escalation process itself and render it ineffective.