RICHMOND, Va. Fifty-eight-year-old Sal Fama is among the dozens of CBS 6 viewers who have contacted us to find out how difficult (really impossible) it is to navigate the Virginia Employment Commission website. . Or a telephone line.
And he has a set of special skills. But that, apparently, was not enough
“It’s very, very frustrating because I like to say, I’m an IT man,” Fama said. “I get it, you know programs go wrong, they twist, they do, they do.”
Fame noted that putting their line of work is sometimes based on projects, so layoffs are not uncommon.
“I’m a project manager, slash project coordinator, in the IT field,” he said. “I’ve been doing it for over 25 years. I started as a programmer and then moved on to project management and was fired about a year ago last February.”
He said he was sure someone with his background could figure out how to fix his problem, which seemed like something out of “Groundhog Day.”
“I went through the phone system, I put it on, I waited about three or four days, I didn’t see any controls, so I said,‘ okay, let me call back and see what happens, ’” he said. “And he asked me, again, to participate for the week ending February 13, 2021. So I did that, and at the end of the call, he says, ‘You’ve been confirmed.'”
Fame had received benefits over the past year, but could not understand why the system accepted their weekly job update, which claimants would have to provide each week on their job availability and efforts to find it, but then nothing would happen.
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“A few days later, he asked me again the same week I finished on 13/02/21, and he asked me, ‘I’ve already done it twice. All right, let me do it a third time,'” he said. dir Fama. “So I did it for the third time, I waited a few more days, I didn’t get anything. So that’s when I called you.”
VEC spokeswoman Joyce Fogg told us claimants should start a new benefit a year after being in the system for 52 weeks. So Fama thought he could fix the problem by correcting his online profile.
But he came across several screens that he, someone quite familiar with computers and software, could not discover. He checked the programs he thought he should be in, and then asked him to submit more papers.
What documents?
He tried to call the VEC.
“I have been calling this number [the VEC 866 number]”Fama said.” And what happens there is that you get to a point where it says, “All the people in our customer service are busy. Call again. So there’s no request to say, leave a message, we’ll call you back “.
We’ve heard it before. With an anguishingly high frequency.
We went back to Fogg wondering, how do you solve a situation like Fame, which surely many plaintiffs could face?
We received this reply by e-mail: “You do not have to be enrolled in two programs. You must apply for the usual UI [unemployment insurance] first and they are denied, before they can apply for PUA [Pandemic Unemployment Assistance]. “
Fama thought he had been denied and thought he had applied for PUA.
But ordering it, for example, by talking to a VEC case worker, apparently won’t happen.
“In fact, it’s a little sad because, you know, it’s IT,” Fama said. “I understand that problems are happening, you can’t get this to work or this to work. It’s very frustrating and unfortunate that they can’t put things together and at least respond, if not to me at least to you.”
Fame points out that he is among the very lucky ones who received his unemployment benefits. But again, it is one of many that when a problem occurs, the resolution can be extremely elusive.