Technical glitch causes delay in unemployment claim payments

BOISE (KIVI) — A technical glitch has caused several thousand unemployment insurance claim payments to be delayed by one day. According to a Facebook post on the Idaho Department of Labor page, it should only affect this week.

People looking for their payment should check their payment information on the Claimant Portal to confirm their new payment date, KIVI reports.

Initial claims went down 23 percent during the week of May 9 with 5,795 filed. It was the sixth week the number of new claims fell.

The number of people who claimed benefits went down to 65,478, a decline of nine percent from the previous week.

Layoffs due to COVID-19 continue to affect all ages, with those under 25 representing almost 20 percent of initial claims for the week of May 9.

Between March 23 and May 9, the Idaho Department of Labor paid out to laid-off Idaho workers $70 million in regular benefits, $504,000 in Pandemic Emergency Unemployment Compensation (PEUC) payments and $123.9 million in Federal Pandemic Unemployment Compensation (FPUC) payments.

Regular benefit payouts for the week of May 3 through 9 reached $13.4 million, a 2 percent decrease over the previous week, but 9.5 times higher than the same week in 2019. Total CARES Act payments increased 6.4 percent for the week of May 3-9 from $28.6 million to $30.4 million.

Weekly claims by county and industry are available on a data dashboard at https://lmi.idaho.gov/ui-weekly-claims.