LAS VEGAS (KTNV) — Nevada's unemployment division is still dealing with a backlog of appealed cases that date back to the pandemic.
Officials from the state's Department of Employment, Training and Rehabilitation tell Channel 13 that nearly 6,400 appealed claims have yet to be resolved following the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in early 2020.
All of those appeals, a department spokeswoman says, are scheduled for hearings.
In January of 2023, at the time when current DETR Director Christopher Sewell was appointed by Nevada Gov. Joe Lombardo, the number of outstanding appeals sat at over 40,000.
"We're still cleaning up some issues on the back end through our appeals," Sewell says. "But those will all be handled by the end of the year."
The fact that DETR is still combing through issues it faced after the onset of the pandemic shows just how the flood of unemployment claims rocked the state agency.
Sewell is the fourth director for the department — including interim placements — since 2020. That year, former director Heather Korbulic quit as interim director because of threats she says she received from unhappy Nevadans.
One of the main reasons why Lombardo tapped Sewell was because the governor believed Sewell was the person to lead DETR through its implementation of a more modernized system to handle claims. The rollout of that system is ongoing, though Sewell says progress has been made.
"We've broken this down to two phases," Sewell says. "Phase one was on the tax side and that deals with businesses, and phase two will be all of the claimants and all of the stuff on the benefits side."
The completion of the second phase isn't expected for a while and the department has run into some glitches along the way.
In early April, some Nevada small business owners started to erroneously receive notices from DETR saying they owed money. In all, the cost of the error, Sewell says, has come to about $38,000.
"We had a batch job done out of the old system," Sewell says. "That batch job wasn't stopped appropriately and it was sent over to our state mail system. Once they get it, they process the mail and do what they're supposed to do. Since then, we've made sure those batch jobs have a stop on them. It won't happen again."
As part of the continued streamlining of DETR's systems, Sewell says the department could eventually employ artificial intelligence to help make its processes go faster.
At the height of its pandemic woes, the department handled over 800,000 "initial" claims for unemployment insurance. Sewell says DETR's staffing vacancy rate is currently below 10%, a far cry from where it had been in recent years, at times as high as over 30%.
"Our staffing is our staffing," Sewell says. "We're moving people around to help us get through this as fast as we can."
There's also the problem of fraudulent claims. Since the pandemic, the state has paid out close to $14 billion in unemployment claims. Sewell says about $2 billion or so was paid out fraudulently but he says the department continues to work with local law enforcement agencies and the state's attorney general's office to find those responsible for those acts of fraud.
"If you got money fraudulently, we'll find you," Sewall says. "It might takes us a while, but we will find you."
