ALBANY, N.Y. \u2014 The New York State Department of Labor is finally replacing its decades-old unemployment system which nearly collapsed during the height of the pandemic.<\/p>\n
For the last 6 years, News10NBC Investigative Reporter Jennifer Lewke has been exposing major issues with the claims process<\/a>, customer service<\/a>, data security<\/a>, and the antiquated processing system<\/a> that left state taxpayers vulnerable to fraud.\u00a0 An audit by the NYS Comptroller has since revealed that billions of dollars were lost to unemployment insurance fraud in New York during that same period.\u00a0<\/p>\n Now, the NYS Labor Department is finally replacing the system with a $188 million dollar cloud-based system.\u00a0 \u00a0<\/p>\n On Monday, November 2, 2026, at 5 p.m., DOL will begin the transition. It promises the upgraded system will make it easier for customers to access the support they need when they need it and significantly streamline requirements for businesses while maintaining strong personal information protection and fraud prevention for all customers.<\/p>\n The process to bring the upgraded UI system fully online is expected to take 9 to 12 days and during that time, all online and phone-based unemployment insurance services will be temporarily unavailable.<\/p>\n New10NBC Investigative Reporter Jennifer Lewke sat down with the Commissioner of the NYS Labor Department, Roberta Reardon to discuss the transition:<\/p>\n Jennifer Lewke: \u201cWhat can you share with us about what New Yorkers can expect?\u201d<\/p>\n Commissioner Reardon: \u00a0\u201cSo, NYS is replacing the over 50-year-old system that was bedeviling us for so long.\u00a0 It\u2019s served us well, but its time has come and we are very, very happy to announce that we are transitioning to a new modern system.\u00a0 It will happen; the transition begins on November 2nd at 5pm. From November 2nd at 5pm for 9 to 12 days, the system will be unavailable to customers while we do all this transition. \u00a0When the system comes back up live, we\u2019ll notify everybody please go back in.\u00a0 Customers who are already part of the unemployment insurance system will log in with their usual log-in, new customers will start a new claim and the only thing that will be different as far as the application goes is that now the new system will have a screen, when you do your weekly certification you will be able to list your three work search attempts from the previous week, it used to be that you had to keep it on paper, it was very inefficient, now it\u2019ll be right on the screen, you\u2019ll do that as you certify. This is an exciting development, the old system expects businesses to communicate with us by fax, we actually have a key punch that is still used for one operation, for anybody who doesn\u2019t know what a key punch is, it\u2019s older than a floppy disk.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n Jennifer Lewke:\u00a0 \u201cThis is the biggest transition of a UI system nationwide, are you worried there are going to be any glitches or problems?\u201d<\/p>\n Commissioner Reardon: \u00a0\u201cSo, we of course, everybody worries all the time that\u2019s what technology does to us but we have been continually testing, that\u2019s one reason it\u2019s taken so long, we wanted to make sure that everything was up to date, as modern as it could be and that it worked as well as could be expected. We are continuing to test even today, we\u2019re running tests. Part of the reason it\u2019s going to take 9-12 days to make the transition is that we need to continually test while we\u2019re loading things into the new system to make sure that it\u2019s working correctly. We have great confidence in this system and the great news is the system will be completely available on mobile devices. You do not have to use a laptop or a desk computer, you\u2019ll have real-time claim status available in your accounts so, you\u2019ll no longer have to call and ask us what\u2019s happening with my claim, it will be right there in your account for you to see, 24\/7 access for businesses, they don\u2019t have to wait for us to open our doors to do business with them.\u201d<\/p>\n Jennifer Lewke:\u00a0 \u201cSo, during the 9-12 days that the system will be out, will benefits still continue to arrive for those who already have active claims?\u201d<\/p>\n Commissioner Reardon: \u201cThere will be a week when nobody will be able to certify so those checks will be paused, when we go live, we ask the customers to go back in, use your log-in that you\u2019ve always used and do the certification, you will be prompted to certify for the current week and the week you missed so, you\u2019ll certify for both so that means your next check will be a little bit bigger because it will be two weeks.\u201d<\/p>\n Jennifer Lewke: \u201cDuring the pandemic, I did some reporting about the system you all were using and how antiquated and old it was, I think the words MS-DOS came up and we all sort of laughed and chuckled, like how is it possible that at agency this big is still using that system and I think that as the years have gone on, you and I have had conversations about how it was partially that system that allowed people to claim benefits that weren\u2019t theirs\u2026What did you do to ensure that the new system is a more state-of-the-art, more technologically advanced, consumer information protected system?\u201d<\/p>\n Commissioner Reardon:\u00a0 \u201cObviously, this was a huge concern for us.\u00a0 I\u2019m very proud to say that with the old system, we catch 97% of attempted fraud before it ever goes out in a check, so that\u2019s really good news.\u00a0 But the new system, obviously it\u2019s brand new technology it is much more secure, I\u2019m not going to name the systems that we use because we don\u2019t want to let everybody know but it is much more advanced, it has a lot of data analytics in it so we can scan claims to make sure that they\u2019re not fraudulent in a way that we never could have before so we know it\u2019s going to be much more secure.\u201d<\/p>\n Jennifer Lewke: \u201cThis is a huge project, how much did it cost? \u00a0Who are you using and do you trust them?\u201d<\/p>\n Commissioner Reardon:\u00a0 \u201cIt\u2019s $188 million, it\u2019s a mix of state and federal money, the vendor is TCS, it\u2019s an Indian company, Tata is their American arm, there are very few companies that do this kind of work in the United States, you cannot buy these systems off the shelf.\u201d<\/p>\n Jennifer Lewke:\u00a0 \u201cOne of the biggest challenges you all experienced during and coming out of the pandemic was the customer service aspect, when people called, they couldn\u2019t get through, do you anticipate having a bigger level of staff coming out of this transition so if there are issues, problems, concerns, people\u2026 regular people who rely on your benefits can get through to actually talk to someone?\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n Commissioner Reardon: \u201cSo, we\u2019ve done a lot of research, and the two main drivers of the phone calls into the call center for UI are, 1) incomplete claims cause currently the system allows them to send forward a claim without all of the information needed and then the system kicks it out, that\u2019s the main reason people call and the second is, where\u2019s my claim.\u00a0 The current system is completely dark about the status of your claim, the new system you can go and it\u2019ll say right there, it\u2019s in process, you can expect your check in this area, or we\u2019re waiting for information from your employer.\u00a0 So those are the two main reasons people call us, those answers will be available right there in your account.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"ALBANY, N.Y. \u2014 The New York State Department of Labor is finally replacing its decades-old unemployment system which…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":359180,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[9,11,10,49,51,50],"class_list":["post-359179","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-new-york","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-headlines","tag-new-york-news","tag-new-york-state","tag-new-york-state-headlines","tag-new-york-state-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/359179","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=359179"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/359179\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/359180"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=359179"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=359179"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=359179"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}