ERIK STAPLES, a father of three in Worcester, lost his job of five years in July 2025 due to company-wide layoffs.
He burned through his savings and is getting financial help from family to help pay his mortgage and keep the lights on while he continues to look for new work. A few months after being laid off, his only car broke down, further limiting his options for a new job since he can’t currently afford a new one. Then, last week, Staples’s partner suffered a stroke — a frightening event that appears to be trending in a positive direction since she was discharged from the hospital, but one that also created a new financial burden as medical bills stack up.
Under normal circumstances, he would have at least some financial fallback from unemployment benefits. But things have been anything but normal under the state’s troubled unemployment insurance system, and Staples has yet to receive a single payment or even a clear answer as to what he’s owed, nearly 10 months after his initial application.
“I’m pretty much at my breaking point,” Staples told CommonWealth Beacon.
May will mark the one-year anniversary of the launch of a new unemployment benefits system that was supposed to usher in a modernized platform to crack down on fraud and lead to a better user experience for staff and claimants alike. But since the onset of that new system, the delivery of jobless benefits has cratered, falling at its lowest point last year to the worst in the nation.
There have been improvements in the system since last summer, but poor performance persists in some areas, and legislators say they continue to hear from constituents like Staples, who have endured months of delay in the processing of their applications for benefits.
Matt Kitsos, a spokesperson for the state Department of Unemployment Assistance, maintained in a statement that the agency has reduced its backlog of pending cases and improved its timeliness in issuing benefits.
“DUA remains committed to hiring and training staff and improving operational efficiency to ensure eligible claimants receive benefits as quickly as possible,” he said.
After DUA implemented its new system, its rate of issuing initial payments to eligible claimants began to fall precipitously. In September, only 42.5 percent of initial payments were made within 35 days of the filing of a claim, making it the worst single month on record in state history. The federal standard calls for making at least 93 percent of initial payments within 35 days.
Since then, things have steadily improved, reaching 85 percent of first payments being issued within 35 days in January. That number, though, has dropped again, declining to 71 percent in March, landing Massachusetts in the bottom five states in the nation by this measure.
Of growing concern, too, is the time it takes claimants whose initial application was denied to receive a determination after they’ve filed an appeal.
The average length of time it takes DUA to issue decisions following an appeal is now 68.6 days — more than double the 30-day average that the US Labor Department lists as its performance benchmark. That number has climbed each month since the new system’s launch in May, is four times larger than it was at this time last year, and ranks among the bottom 10 in the country, according to federal data.
Kitsos said the growing average case age is a result of an increase in appeals due to the agency’s progress in issuing initial eligibility decisions and expanded fraud prevention activities. In March, there were nearly 13,000 cases pending an appeal hearing decision, up from just 1,600 a year prior.
The agency said it also launched a “triage team” to determine whether certain types of issues can be resolved without a hearing and is currently training 10 review examiners.
But Jason Salgado, a staff attorney at Greater Boston Legal Services, said DUA still isn’t addressing the fundamental pervasive problems with the new system, which are the large amounts of issues being generated that are prompting appeals and hearings in the first place.
“Nearly a year since the launch of DUA’s new online system — and despite the tireless work of DUA frontline staff to keep up with the number of issues generated by the new online system — claimants are continuing to experience unacceptable delays in having their claims processed and receiving the benefits for which they are eligible,” he said in a statement. “More urgent action is needed to identify and address the underlying causes of the barriers and delays caused by the new online system on a systemic basis.”
In Staples’s case, he appealed a denial of benefits in October and received a hearing with DUA in December. On the day of his hearing, Staples learned that DUA determined he was, in fact, eligible for some benefits, though a lesser amount because of money he took out of his retirement savings once he was laid off from his job as a call center manager at Spectrum Communication, according to case documents viewed by CommonWealth Beacon.
Yet nearly five months after that determination, Staples has yet to receive any money from DUA. And, his claim on the DUA platform is still listed as “open,” his file shows, despite persistent calls to understand why there is a holdup.
“I don’t know how many times at this point my case has been ‘escalated,’” he said.
DUA declined to comment on Staples’s case.
DUA, for its part, says that the agency has made substantial progress since the launch of the new system — hailed initially by Gov. Maura Healey’s administration as one that will demonstrate “national leadership.”
Average call wait time is now just five minutes, compared with more than two hours in January 2025. Nearly 70 percent of claims are now processed — either paid or denied — within 30 days, up from 53 percent last year. And the agency is in the process of hiring 150 new employees.
Those improvements, alongside the challenges tied to adjusting to a new system, are happening in a much more constrained fiscal environment. DUA operations are entirely federally funded, and that funding is nearly $20 million less this fiscal year compared with fiscal year 2023, according to the agency.
The issue has largely escaped scrutiny on Beacon Hill, but lawmakers held a hearing on Wednesday to consider a bill filed by two first-term House members that would draw attention to the delays in unemployment insurance benefits by establishing a special commission to study the system.
Reps. Hadley Luddy and Joshua Tarsky, both Democrats, said in a recent joint interview that their offices have dealt with constituent issues with accessing unemployment benefits more than any other type of casework during their first terms in office.
Though they aren’t yet sure whether legislative leaders plan to advance the measure — both House Speaker Ron Mariano and Senate President Karen Spilka previously declined to indicate whether they would take any action — Luddy and Tarsky believe the legislation has general interest given how other lawmakers have been inundated with similar complaints and frustrations from residents.
“We worry that the process itself is still just too inefficient,” Tarsky testified in support of the bill. “When our offices do reach out to DUA for assistance, we’ve experienced great success in getting timely information and adjudications for our constituents. But what happens to those constituents who don’t know to reach out to their state representatives or state senators? Are they just lost and don’t know whether to file and never collect their benefits?”
Sen. Jake Oliveira, a Democrat who co-chairs the Legislature’s labor and workforce development committee, echoed that sentiment, saying that claimants “shouldn’t have to call your state rep or your state senator in order to process your unemployment claim.”
Lawmakers last month questioned Labor and Workforce Development Secretary Lauren Jones in a budget hearing about the unemployment issues, and have had six briefings with DUA over the last year, including members-only briefings in March.
During Wednesday’s hearing, Oliveira attempted to inject a bit of levity into the discussion of the troubled system, alluding to the designation of two seats on the proposed commission for residents who have filed claims for unemployment benefits. “We’re all up for reelection this November,” he said, so “hopefully we won’t need to fill one of those unemployment seats.”
Yet there’s no clear sign that the legislation to form a commission will advance or that Beacon Hill has other ideas it wants to pursue that would provide any real relief for claimants in the lurch.
“I don’t even know how we’re scraping by,” Staples said. “This whole thing has left me feeling pretty hopeless.”
