Gov. Kevin Stitt’s Secretary of Digital Transformation, David Ostrowe, in partnership with the Oklahoma Employment Security Commission (OESC) and Executive Director Robin Roberson announced the State agency has made headway in upgrading the state’s decades old system for filing unemployment claims.
“Since the first of April, the agency has processed over 160,000 claims, which is more than the agency traditionally processes in one full year,” said Ostrowe. “The speed of processing these critical and timely benefits was made possible due to rapid and significant digital improvements made to the agency’s operations in partnership with OMES.”
The agency has also added more than 1,000 help-desk agents to the call center in the last three weeks, and over 200 help-desk agents were added beginning April 20 to assist in call backs to customers. This allowed more than 71,000 claims to move through the process where they were once stalled.
Oklahoma is one of the first states to fund Pandemic Unemployment Assistance and citizens are now able to apply for Pandemic Unemployment Assistance online.
Other changes include:
- A new claims status process has been put in place to allow citizens to more easily check the status of their claim without having to contact the help desk.
- A new weekly claims filing process has been deployed, this new process allows citizens to more easily submit their weekly claims attestation visit.
- Over 160,000 new claims processed since April 1 through April 22.