WHITESBURG., Ky. — Will Bowman had a few different jobs around Letcher County before the pandemic.

“I had more work than I could handle,” he said. “A lot of times, I’d get to choose — I mean if I’d see something I want to do, I would do it — but now it’s just slowed down to hardly nothing, to barely anything.”

Like thousands of others in Kentucky, eventually, Bowman had to file for unemployment benefits.

He filed in July last year and didn’t receive benefits for a couple of months, but eventually, the money came in.

“By December, I’m dependent on this stuff. Everybody is still quarantined, locked down. I’m dependent on this,” Bowman said. “I’m paying my bills, and then it just disappeared. It dried up.”

In January, not too long after Congress passed an extension of the federal pandemic unemployment program, his benefits stopped.

The unemployment site told him he failed the identity verification requirements.

Bowman tried to get help to fix the issue, but he can’t travel far because his vehicles are in bad shape, so in-person help isn’t an option.

No one answers the unemployment phone lines, either, even when Bowman was put in a queue with thousands of others.

“No one ever calls me back,” he said. “This phone goes with me everywhere, to the restroom, I take it everywhere because I’m scared I’m going to miss this phone call.”

The governor’s office is in the process of finding a company to rebuild the unemployment site, but during a meeting of the Unemployment Insurance Reform Task Force this week, Labor Cabinet officials said a company hired to do the job backed out because of how much cybersecurity work was involved.

Now it’s back to the drawing board for Gov. Andy Beshear.

“There is no UI system in the country that was ready for the flood of claims we got, nor had the security to deal with the cyber attacks that we saw,” Beshear said Wednesday. “That means that we’ve got to create something new and state of the art, and we’ve got to get it right.”

Lawmakers passed funding for 90 new unemployment office workers in the most recent budget, but funding comes from the American Rescue Plan Act, so Beshear said it needs to be reauthorized next year with state funds.

Morgan Eaves, director of legislative affairs for the Labor Cabinet, told the unemployment task force this week there are several positions open they can’t fill.

“We’re having trouble attracting skilled employees to these positions because, according to the potential employees, there’s no guarantee of permanency in a position,” she said. “It’ll take three-to-six months to get these staffers up and trained, and essentially then they’ll only have six months to work before their job disappears.”

Labor cabinet staff members have handled more than 40,000 in-person appointments since April 15 and taken more than 70,000 calls.

Bowman’s trying to get back to work, but now his family’s cars need serious repairs, so picking up the kind of jobs he did before isn’t as easy.

“I can’t afford to have them fixed, can’t fix them, can’t do anything without funds,” Bowman said.

Within hours of Spectrum News 1 contacting the governor’s office about Bowman’s claim on Wednesday, he said an official with the unemployment office reached out to him, told him the claim was processed, and he’ll receive benefits soon.

The Labor Cabinet reported last week that it has 123,334 unresolved unemployment claims dating back to March 2020, including 72,542 with no fraud or identity issues.