IN THE MONTHS AFTER Massachusetts adopted a new platform meant to improve the unemployment assistance system for both jobless Bay Staters and state workers managing claims, disbursement of those benefits trickled to a nation-leading low.
The issues, as it turned out, had been festering in the years before that 2025 system update, a new report from Auditor Diana DiZoglio reveals.
Those snags ranged from claimants stuck on hold for over an hour to poor access to in-person assistance in communities around the state to long lags in the issuance of payments for qualified residents staring down unemployment.
As a result, the report concludes, Massachusetts risks losing federal funding as well as saddling vulnerable claimants with delayed access and lost trust.
DiZoglio’s review of the Department of Unemployment Assistance was mainly limited to two years between 2022 and 2024. That’s before the agency implemented a new benefits system which, as chronicled by CommonWealth Beacon this year, led to the slowest rate of payments in the country.
Lengthy delays at DUA have reverberated around Beacon Hill, where lawmakers report being inundated with complaints from constituents about the agency’s lack of responsiveness.
However, legislative leaders have done little to tackle the problem. A pair of first-term lawmakers have been pushing for months to convene a special commission that would examine the issues, but it now appears even that modest proposal is dead until the start of the new term in 2027 at the earliest.
Yet the auditor’s report unveils how, even before the agency was thrust into more recent turmoil with record-breaking poor performance during a time of a relatively stable job market, out-of-work Massachusetts residents for years weren’t receiving the help they needed in a timely fashion.
“When hardworking people lose their jobs, unemployment insurance becomes a lifeline that allows them to continue to pay bills while they search for a new job,” DiZoglio said in a statement. “When those benefit payments are delayed, job search resources are unavailable, and complaints are not tracked and prioritized appropriately, the system fails job seekers and taxpayers alike.”
Matthew Kitsos, a DUA spokesperson, said the agency is “committed to improving customer experiences and ensuring eligible claimants receive benefits in a timely fashion.” He added in a statement that DUA has “taken significant steps to address challenges head-on,” including launching a pilot program to process claims more efficiently and hiring more adjudicators and seasonal staff.
For the vast majority of claims, DUA did not meet the federal performance standard that calls for issuing 93 percent of benefits within 35 days of a claim in any of the 24 months that DiZoglio reviewed. In April 2024, that number dropped below 70 percent, the lowest month included in the audit.
The agency implemented a new system in May 2025 that Gov. Maura Healey vowed would catapult the state into “national leadership” for the delivery of benefits. But the percentage of payments issued to claimants within 35 days only plunged deeper to 42.5 percent last September, an all-time state low. The data has since improved over time, with 83 percent of benefits now paid within 35 days as of July, the most recent month with data available.
Unemployment benefits themselves are paid through a tax on Massachusetts employers, while the federal government funds the administration of that assistance across the states.
On call wait times, DiZoglio’s report criticized DUA for a failure to demonstrate that “call log data was being monitored at all” to evaluate performance.
Out of more than 700,000 calls over a one-year period, the report found that it took 30 minutes to respond to about half of all inbound calls either from a call center agent or an automated voice prompt. Wait times exceeded an hour for about a quarter of the calls.
Claimants hung up on DUA call centers around 30 percent of the time during some months in 2024 — six times as much as the 5 percent standard, “indicating challenges in managing call volume and access to service,” the report notes.
Kitsos said that call wait times are now down from an average of two hours to between four and 11 minutes.
DUA, citing budget and staff constraints, also failed to offer in-person assistance at three regional offices in Brockton, Springfield, and Lawrence, which were used for appeal hearings, during the audit period.
That meant claimants had to travel in some cases 200 miles roundtrip to Boston, further increasing wait times and delaying access to benefits, DiZoglio noted. The agency responded to that point in the report by noting that as of last July, DUA staff is now providing in-person services at career centers across the state.
Rep. Joshua Tarsky, a first-term Democrat who co-sponsored the legislation to establish a special commission on unemployment insurance, said in an interview that the auditor’s report further validates the push to scrutinize the system – even though his bill likely won’t advance this year, he conceded.
“These unemployment benefits aren’t abstract,” said Tarsky, who plans to re-file the bill alongside Rep. Hadley Luddy next session. “They are monies for people who are wanting to buy food, diapers, pay for their heat. It’s something that you can’t just, if it’s working inefficiently, let it go. We need to actually fix this so that our constituents can get the money they need and get the benefits that they’re entitled to.”
The auditor also alleged that DUA violated state public records law by only retaining call log data for 13 months instead of three years, limiting the agency’s ability to “review and evaluate its call-handling performance.” Kitsos said that DUA disagrees with the auditor’s interpretation of records retention requirements and maintained that the agency is in compliance with the law.
Nor did DUA take necessary steps to guard against fraud, which has become more prevalent since the 2020 pandemic. The agency didn’t complete the required number of claim reviews in fiscal years 2023 and 2024 — DUA cited a reassignment of six staff investigators to support the launch of the new system as the reason — which “could increase the risk of DUA not identifying improper payments.”
And DiZoglio zoomed farther out, reaching back to a major Gov. Charlie Baker-era mishap in which the prior Republican administration erroneously spent more than $2 billion in federal Covid funds for unemployment benefits.
Despite an agreement between Gov. Maura Healey and the feds to pay much of that money back over 10 years, DUA should provide the US Labor Department with a written update since the launch of the new platform last year “given the exorbitant amount of taxpayer dollars involved,” the report finds.
To course correct on the issues that DiZoglio identified, the report recommends that DUA should routinely review call log data, implement system alerts for missing information from claimants, offer in-person assistance at regional offices, identify the underlying issues driving delays in benefit payments, and consider hiring additional staff members.
