They Filed for Unemployment Last Month. They Haven't Seen a Dime.

Carly Keohane has yet to benefit from any of the improvements.

Keohane, who lost her waitressing job in Rochester, New York, has been waiting a month to receive $2,124 in unemployment payments as a direct deposit into her bank account.

But the state instead told her that the money had been deposited on a state-issued debit card, which she never received. She cannot reach anyone on the phone to find out where it is.

“I call the Department of Labor every single day, and I know the options by heart now,” said Keohane, 31, whose checking account was down to $10.35. “It would be OK if I just knew where the money was.”

As the coronavirus pandemic and near-nationwide stay-at-home orders exact an astonishing toll on the U.S. economy, state unemployment systems have cratered under a never-before-seen deluge of jobless claims. In the past four weeks, about 22 million workers filed jobless claims, including about 1.2 million New Yorkers.

Unemployment systems, some of which rely on an antiquated computer programming language that has largely gone the way of dinosaurs, were not built for such a rush of claimants.

They also were not built for a new class of workers — independent contractors and the self-employed — who are eligible for assistance during the outbreak.

The results have been disastrous and maddening. Many people have had their online applications crash before they could hit submit, requiring them to start over from scratch. They have endured hourslong wait times over several days only to be randomly disconnected, or connected with representatives who say they cannot address their problems.

In other states, including Kansas and Missouri, applicants say that they are still waiting for unemployment payments to arrive, and that they have experienced long wait times on the phone, as well as busy signals, disconnections and error-prone online applications. Without unemployment assistance, they have relied on friends, family and savings, if they have any, to survive.

For New York applicants lucky enough to get through and submit a claim, some have been jolted awake at 2 a.m. by calls from the state Labor Department seeking to confirm their identities.

Speaking in Albany on Thursday, the secretary to the governor, Melissa DeRosa, said New York had been staggering under the weight of more than 1 million claims for unemployment insurance, about four times the number of people who lost jobs in the 2008 financial crisis.

“We are going to continue doing everything we can to bring the system up to deal with this scale,” she said.

A Labor Department spokesman said Friday that after the agency made changes to its unemployment system, including updating its application, its call center had made more than 470,000 follow-up calls to New Yorkers who had not submitted completed claims.

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Keohane was saving for a down payment on a house. Instead, she has withdrawn all of her money to pay for groceries and diapers and wipes for her 2-year-old son.

She has debated whether to get groceries from a food pantry but she cannot bring herself to do it.

“It’s not right for me to have to go there,” she said. “There are people who are more needy than me.”

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Amy Berryman, a playwright who was let go from a wine bar in Manhattan last month, has not received the debit card the state said it sent her weeks ago. Every week when she has to certify her unemployment claim, she asks that her payment be deposited into her bank account. It never has been.

“I’m trying to spend $50 a week or less,” said Berryman, 31, as she stood in line at a grocery store to buy fresh produce, which she has been using to make lots of soup.

The $2.2 trillion federal stimulus that Congress passed last month set aside especially generous benefits for those who recently lost jobs: $600 a week on top of what states offer for unemployment. (The maximum weekly unemployment in New York is $504.)

But the stimulus has exacerbated the problem for states, which are now responsible for administering an enormous expansion of unemployment benefits for previously ineligible workers. For the first time, independent contractors and self-employed workers qualify for relief.

But in New York and other states, those workers are facing an extra set of head-scratching bureaucratic obstacles.

Self-employed New Yorkers, for instance, must first apply for traditional unemployment benefits even though they are not eligible. Once the state denies their claim, they can then pursue the new pandemic-related benefits available to them.

Jennifer Walsh, a self-employed hair stylist in upstate New York who stopped working on March 14, submitted her application more than two weeks ago. She is still waiting to be denied.

“Why is this even a step?” said Walsh, who added that many of her friends in the hair business were in the same situation. “I understand this is a new process for everyone, but in the meantime we are broke and we have no answers.”

While she waits, Walsh has been using credit cards and her savings to buy food and pay bills. “That will only go so far,” she said.

DeRosa said Thursday that roughly 275,000 New Yorkers still had outstanding unemployment claims, most of them self-employed, which requires additional paperwork and confirmation.

State officials said Friday that the federal government was requiring New York state to confirm that those workers were not eligible for traditional unemployment before processing their claims for pandemic assistance. The state is working to create a single unemployment application for such workers.

But challenges with New York’s unemployment system are just the start of problems for many people who are out of work. More than a half-dozen New Yorkers who recently lost their jobs told The New York Times that they asked that unemployment payments be deposited in their checking accounts, but received debit cards instead.

James Colón, who was let go from the Strand bookstore in Manhattan last month, received one of the cards, issued by Key Bank, a regional bank based in Cleveland. Its online banking system worked the first day, but now shows an error message when he tries to log on.

Without access to Key Bank’s site, he cannot transfer the money into his checking account to pay May rent. No one at Key Bank has been able to resolve the problem, he said.

A Key Bank representative did not immediately respond to questions about its unemployment benefits card. Other states, including Washington and Indiana, also disperse unemployment assistance onto the bank’s cards.

The New York Labor Department had temporarily suspended direct deposit payments because of back-end problems, state officials said. During that period, the state issued the debit cards to ensure claimants received payments.

“This situation is entirely unacceptable — we expect all our contractors to responsibly and reliably deliver benefits for New Yorkers,” a Labor Department spokesman said. “We will ensure every single New Yorker who is entitled to unemployment benefits gets them.”

Bobbie de Matos, who lost her job as a server at a table-tennis themed bar in Manhattan, received a Key Bank card, which she did not request. It also does not work.

After calling the bank over many days, including holding for four hours on one call, de Matos said she finally reached a representative who told her that the card had not been assigned to her or anyone.

She needed to ask the state’s Labor Department to fix the issue, the person told her. But the state said it was an error with the bank. A new card is supposed to arrive in the mail soon.

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She is hoping everything will be cleared up by next Friday, when she is scheduled to move from Manhattan to Brooklyn and will need to pay the movers.

“It’s a complete mess,” said de Matos, 23.

Long before the stay-at-home orders, Melvin Taylor II was let go from a production position in New York City. He received a Key Bank card in the mail late last year for his unemployment benefits.

Right as mass layoffs and furloughs began about a month ago, Key Bank alerted him that it had detected potential fraud on his card and automatically canceled it.

Taylor said he had not been able to reach a bank representative to order a replacement card.

“You’d be on the phone 3 hours, 59 minutes and 27 seconds, and then the phone would cut off,” Taylor said.

He has resorted to searching through coats and pants for loose change — he found about $20 — and has experimented with cheap and filling rice and pasta recipes.

“There are a lot of different spices that you can put in rice,” he said.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times .