Lawmakers in Harrisburg grilled the state’s labor and industry secretary over continuing problems with the unemployment system.
At a hearing this week, Jennifer Berrier tried to explain why people are struggling to get the department to answer the phone or process claims.
“When the federal pandemic benefits expired in September, our ability to use contract staff for merit work also expired,” Berrier said. “So all those individuals who we were borrowing from other agencies and contractors we were using, we could no longer use them to process actual claims.”
Berrier also said this is their busiest time of year so the combination of working through old and new claims with a shortened staff is making it difficult to keep up.
“We had to basically give back the resources from the departments we were borrowing from and then use our contractors in other ways,” Berrier said.