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MORE COMPLAINTS South Florida resident Judith Phillpotts is among them. “It is very important, because I am a single paycheck and I have bills to pay,” Phillpotts said when asked about the benefits she was waiting on. Phillpotts said she called NBC 6 Responds when her unemployment benefits suddenly stopped being processed at the end of December. She told us she is still furloughed from her job in the travel industry, but her unemployment claim was halted due to a “Return to Work” error on her account. “It seems to be a simple process, but for some reason it is a difficult thing on t...

The conversation with Deloitte on Monday was part of a meeting of the Florida Senate Select Committee on Pandemic Preparedness and Response. Deloitte leaders said they're sympathetic to the challenges Floridians have and are still facing with unemployment during this pandemic. When questioned by state legislators, Deloitte officials said the system was working well when it first launched in 2013 and was stress-tested to handle hurricanes and a financial crisis. But the pandemic caused a drastic spike in demand. For almost a year, Spectrum News has been reporting extensively on the issues...

The agency launched the latest review nearly 10 months ago at the directive of Gov. Ron DeSantis. The report found Florida Department of Economic Opportunity ultimately overpaid for its CONNECT unemployment system; a system that was not properly designed nor tested. “We determined that the requirements for system capacity, as outlined in the 2010 ITN, were never fully tested nor documented,” Inspector General investigators wrote in the preliminary report released Thursday. “The contract mandated system capacity for a minimum of 200,000 concurrent external users. We could not find eviden...

That would include $73 million over the next two years to upgrade the DEO's IT system and move the unemployment benefit system to a cloud-based program, Eagle said.  Eagle is also pushing for money to hire 435 new full-time employees who would be used for the next year or two to process complicated claims.  In an appearance before the Florida Senate's Select Committee on Pandemic Preparedness on Monday, Eagle acknowledged that the third-party call center agents brought in to help last year can't handle complicated claims. The audit will be used to urge state lawmakers to help fix the system...

In the community of Highland View, just west of Port St. Joe, the storm surge from Hurricane Michael toppled houses and knocked mobile homes completely over. Panhandle residents still recovering from Hurricane Michael can get additional help covering the costs of repairing or rebuilding their storm-damaged homes. The Florida Department of Economic Opportunity has made $246 million in federal long-term recovery dollars available to residents in a dozen counties across the Big Bend region. “The launch of the Rebuild Florida Housing Repair and Replacement Program is a key milestone toward comp...