TOPEKA — When Ryan Wright was tapped by Gov. Laura Kelly to take over the Kansas Department of Labor in June, coronavirus had ruthlessly gutted the state’s economy and overwhelmed the agency responsible for delivering timely financial aid to people thrown out of work.
The unprecedented wave of joblessness meant people were unable to get through to labor department call centers. The agency’s creaky computer system showed its age. A backlog of claims kept expanding. Politicians eager to highlight weaknesses in the Kelly administration had a heyday. Then, the labor department tried to claw back incorrect payments and some of those transactions overdrafted unemployed Kansans’ bank accounts. It cost labor secretary Delia Garcia her job, and ushered in the Wright era.
In an interview, Wright said the addition of full-time and temporary staff and a series of IT network patches had helped stabilize the system. He also said his office had blocked about 55,000 attempts at fraud. Just as no magical remedy for COVID-19 has emerged, neither has a silver bullet for what challenges the labor department.
“I used to hear a lot about people not getting through, not getting responses,” Wright said. “Right now, we’re hearing a lot about identity theft. I heard from a conservative legislator the other day, ‘Thank you. We can tell you’re doing stuff there.’”
The Kansas unemployment trust fund had $900 million at outset of the pandemic. If it goes dry, the state can borrow from the federal government. What is the fund’s status?
“It was very healthy. We’ve been, of course, drawing down on that. We expect it will go insolvent after the first of the year. As of about a month ago … we were just hitting kind of where we were at when the great recession started, that $600 million mark.”
“To date, we’ve stopped 55,000 fraudulent claims. It’s all targeted to the PUA program. To give you some idea of the scope, the U.S. Department of Labor’s office of inspector general estimates that this is costing taxpayers $8 billion nationally. Kansas is not out of the norm. This is absolutely hitting every state right now.”
