by Wolf Richter
Wolf Street
California Emerged from its “Reset.”
California’s Employment Development Department – whacked by reports of chaos and massive backlogs in processing and paying unemployment claims, and by waves of fraudulent claims, particularly under the federal Pandemic Unemployment Assistance (PUA) for the self-employed – announced on September 19 that it had “paused” processing claims for a “reset” period during which it would fix the issues and catch up with its backlog.
This pause halted California’s reporting of unemployment claims to the Department of Labor; and in the following weeks, the DOL then just copied and pasted California’s last reported data into its weekly unemployment claims report. California accounts for about a quarter of US unemployment claims.