ACCESS NYC aims to increase the accessibility and convenience of discovering and enrolling in government benefits. These patterns support this work by defining the UI and behavior that New Yorkers experience as they use the site.
The California Employment Development Department (CA EDD) launched the EDDNext initiative to modernize benefit delivery, focusing on user-centric procurement for a new identity verification system.
This paper concludes that the substantial COVID-19 unemployment insurance expansion had limited disincentive effects on job searches, particularly among lower-income individuals, despite high wage replacement rates.
This Issue Spotlight explores the challenges that recipients of public benefits programs offering cash assistance encounter in accessing funds through financial products or services, with a specific focus on assistance provided on prepaid cards.
The vast fraud committed through the use of stolen and synthetic identities in UI programs has spotlighted the need for updated identity fraud detection mechanisms. As states are implementing new technologies and systems, they need to consider the ways in which they are impacting racial inequities in UI benefits.
Through the interviews, ULP sought to capture details of claimant experience, see how and why system failures occurred, and make recommendations for reform now—before another financial or public health crisis suddenly causes state unemployment rates to spike.
This paper describes the policy choices, business practices, and technology innovations that the State of New Jersey is employing to ensure that the right people get benefits — accurately and on time.
This post argues that for the types of large-scale, organized fraud attacks that many state benefits systems saw during the pandemic, solutions grounded in cybersecurity methods may be far more effective than creating or adopting automated systems.
In February 2023, the Digital Benefits Network at the Beeck Center for Social Impact + Innovation released a dataset documenting authentication and identity verification requirements that unemployment insurance (UI) applicants encounter across the United States. This resource outlines high-level observations from the data and more information about the research process.
This report by EPIC investigates how automated decision-making (ADM) systems are used across Washington, D.C.’s public services and the resulting impacts on equity, privacy, and access to benefits.
The U.S. Department of Labor provides a playbook to help state workforce agencies enhance communication with unemployment claimants by offering clear, proactive updates on claim statuses, thereby improving claimant satisfaction and reducing call center inquiries.
