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.