COLUMBUS, Ohio — Gov. Mike DeWine and officials from the state’s Job and Family Services department (ODJFS) announced updates March 8 to improve the customer experience and fraud prevention efforts for the state’s unemployment program, nearly a year after the pandemic drove unemployment claims to record-high numbers.
Twelve companies and 30 leaders are now a part of the Job and Family Services Public-Private Partnership (P-3), representing financial services, insurance, processing, technology, and advisory services. Two new vendors, IBM and LexisNexis Risk Solutions, now contract with the state to help resolve the challenges in the unemployment program.
“Everyone at (OD)JFS including all of our vendors, recognize the urgency that is needed to improve our unemployment system so that eligible Ohioans are served in the most efficient possible,” says incoming interim Director of ODJFS Matt Damschroder. Damschroder made his first appearance on the March 8 coronavirus briefing as interim director after the former director, Kimberly Henderson, resigned for personal reasons. Henderson will remain for several months as an adviser to ODJFS.
The nearly 2.8 million initial unemployment claims over the past year of the pandemic overwhelmed ODJFS, its decades-old technology, and reduced staff. Since the beginning of the pandemic, ODJFS has worked to add more than a thousand personnel to handle claims, and additional technology vendors to resolve system issues to improve service.
And, international and local fraud actors have pummeled Ohio’s unemployment systems, resulting in hundreds of thousands of fraudulent overpayments, and even more processing delays.
The two new vendors will provide fraud prevention and detection services as well as call center support services. The head of the newly-created public-private partnership, Jeff Ficke, says new partner LexisNexis Risk Solutions services, in addition to Experian, will help reduce fraud in the system.
“We’re very confident in a short period of time that we will be able to put a more secure door front of the organizations to stop the fraudsters and have them start pointing in other directions outside of Ohio,” says Ficke who is currently Managing Director with Russell Allan Partners.
Haywood Talcove of Lexis-Nexis spoke with Spectrum News earlier this year, and suggested that front-end identity verification solutions like those used in banking and retail could help mitigate some of the fraudulent activity, and said the implementation costs would be around $1 million. The values of the contract signed with the state of Ohio or specific services to be provided were not released during the briefing.
The state also contracted with IBM to incorporate its IBM Watson artificial intelligence technology to help coordinate call center activities.
“It is truly an artificial intelligence platform that learns at it goes,” says Ficke. “And, we can actually develop technology to automate the answers to questions and making sure that we actually route people to the right customer service people as fast as possible.
Ficke also said new partnerships with “well-known big data companies” are coming shortly, intended to help sift through the backlog of claims using data to help segment fraudulent from actual claims in the system.
The P-3 and ODJFS will also work to analyze all contracts with private vendors to ensure that they are meeting needs and expectations of the state.
“There are so many third-party key relationships that are involved in the delivery of all of these services to all of Ohio’s citizens, we are making sure that we are looking at those, making sure that they are doing what they need to be doing, and making sure we are getting everything out of them that we need to,” says Ficke.
Data released March 8 by ODJFS reports that the department paid $8.7 billion in regular unemployment benefits during the past year to 954,000 Ohioans, and $9.5 billion in Pandemic Unemployment Assistance benefits to 987,000 Ohioans.