New jobless claims in Washington drop slightly but unpaid backlog remains

OLYMPIA – The number of Washington workers filing new claims for unemployment benefits continued to drop last week, leading state officials to conclude two things:

• The economy is improving and some people forced out of work by the COVID-19 shutdowns are returning to the job. Some sectors of the economy are showing drops in the number of workers seeking first-time claims, and Spokane County is among those where new claims dropped in the week ending June 13.

• The massive identity theft that grabbed more than a half-billion dollars or more through phony claims is being thwarted. An estimated $350 million of it has been recovered.

But the backlog of claims that still must be processed before any benefits will be paid – caused by a combination of record requests and the fraudulent claims using stolen identity information – continues to grow. On Thursday, 50 Washington National Guard soldiers joined more than 400 members of the Employment Security Department staff to help clear the backlog.

Commissioner Suzi LeVine said about 81,000 claims for benefits filed between March 8 and June 15 have not received a payment because of one or more issues that must be resolved.

Many were flagged because of questions about the claimant’s identity. In slightly more than half the cases, the claimant received some payments before being notified there was a problem that needed to be resolved and payments stopped; in other cases, the claimant has yet to receive a payment.

“Those waiting the longest” will get priority in resolving their unpaid claims, LeVine said.

The estimate for the amount of money initially lost to fraudulent claims remained the same as it has been for several weeks, between $550 million and $650 million because recent efforts by state and federal officials have been successful. Meanwhile, the state has managed to claw back an additional $13 million taken by the schemes, bringing the recovered total to $350 million.

“There will be some of that we won’t be able to get back,” LeVine said.

By July 13, the department expects to resolve about 33,400 claims that were filed before May 2, when the state took new precautions to fight the massive number of fraudulent claims.

New claims for state unemployment benefits last week totaled 29,028, down 2.3 percent statewide from the previous week, as were initial claims for special federal benefits approved by Congress in response to the pandemic. But the state paid out nearly $455 million to about 400,000 individuals filing some type of new or continuing claim.

Since the pandemic shutdowns started in March, nearly 1.2 million individuals have filed claims and the state has paid out $5.4 billion in benefits, from a combination of state and federal sources.

The sharpest increase in new claims came from the manufacturing sector, while the health care, retail trade and construction sectors all saw decreases.

Laid-off workers in Spokane County filed 1,617 new unemployment claims the week ending June 13, an 8% decrease compared to 1,765 claims filed the prior week, according to the employment security department.

Workers in the county have filed a total of 83,409 initial jobless claims since the pandemic took hold in the state in mid-March.

In data released Thursday, the greatest number of unemployment benefit applications in the county were from health care and social assistance workers, who filed 264 new claims. Employees in the food services and accommodation sector filed 211, and specialty trade contractors filed 83.

Spokane County is seeing a decrease in both initial and continuing unemployment claims, indicating people are going back to work, said Doug Tweedy, regional economist for the Washington State Employment Security Department.

Before the county entered Phase 2 of Gov. Jay Inslee’s Safe Start reopening plan, laid-off workers had filed 36,112 continuing jobless claims. That number has dropped nearly 40% to 21,981 claims last week.

Staff writer Amy Edelen contributed to this report.