I had the opportunity to interview with Kiro-TV yesterday on the ESD unemployment benefits debacle. After a half hour interview, they only shared about 20 seconds of it.
Generally though…I shared that my office is receiving many requests a day from people at their wits end and nearly destitute.
It’s so difficult hearing these stories from folks through no fault of their own in such dire straits and getting no responses for them from our inquiries. They tell us they’ve called 300, 400 even 1500 times in a day to never get through…or to get through- sit on hold for hours and then get disconnected!!!
We are told there are 41 THOUSAND cases in adjudication-mostly for 11-12 weeks. 90 THOUSAND total still needing to be paid.
We have contacted ESD on behalf of our constituents pleading and insisting they at the very least acknowledge they’ve gotten our emails.
Radio silence ….
In fact, we were told on a call with ESD 2 days ago that their emails had exceeded the server limit. So.. they deleted them.
Deleted them?
We’ve heard that there could be nearly $1 BILLION stolen from WA taxpayers by Nigerian scammers. How did that happen? How come we don’t know more? And yet $333 MILLION (precisely) of that has been retrieved. How were they able to get it back?
This is a failure of this agency of epic proportions!!!
Who’s being held accountable? To date …no one.
I’ll continue to keep up the pressure for answers.