More than 600,000 Oregonians have filed jobless claims since the coronavirus outbreak took hold in the middle of March, and tens of thousands of them are still waiting for their benefits.

In the month since Gov. Kate Brown replaced the director of the Oregon Employment Department, the state has finished processing the vast majority of backlogged, regular unemployment claims.

New jobless claims are still pouring in at twice the rate they were before the pandemic, though, and Oregon continues to struggle to pay benefits to self-employed workers, who are newly eligible for benefits. The department’s phone lines remain completely jammed, and there are few alternatives for people to address problems with their claims.

“We know Oregonians are frustrated, struggling and desperate for their benefits,” the department’s interim Director David Gerstenfeld said on a media call Wednesday. Gerstenfeld said he and the department’s employees share their frustrations.

Is anybody at all getting their benefits?Yes. But whether or not workers have been paid depends a great deal on the type of claims they filed.

The Oregon Employment Department says it has paid out $2.5 billion in claims to an estimated 273,000 newly jobless workers since the middle of March.

The department has largely worked through its backlog of regular unemployment claims. The backlog of unprocessed claims, which once numbered more than 100,000, is now around 2,000 — though many people with complicated claims that were initially denied must go through a lengthy adjudication process that takes several weeks before getting paid.

Tens of thousands of other jobless Oregonians — including many self-employed people and large numbers of furloughed workers whose employers are participating in the state’s Work Share program — haven’t been paid at all.

Many of those workers, some of whom have been waiting months for payments, won’t be paid before August.

Why is it taking so long to pay self-employed people who are out of work?In March, Congress created a new program called Pandemic Unemployment Assistance, or PUA, a federally funded mechanism to pay jobless benefits for self-employed workers, contractors and others who don’t qualify for regular benefits.

Oregon still has about 65,000 unprocessed Pandemic Unemployment Assistance claims – and says it won’t work through that backlog before the second week of August. By that time, thousands of those claimants will have gone without income for as many as four months.

Here’s what went wrong.

It took the Oregon Employment Department about a month to get the new program up and running. It began taking applications in late April but didn’t have personnel trained to process the claims and didn’t even have a phone number for people to inquire about the status of their claim until the middle of June.

During that period, thousands of Pandemic Unemployment Assistance claimants flooded the already overloaded phone number for regular claims in a fruitless quest for information about their own backlogged benefits. The people manning the phone lines for regular claims had no answers to give them because they weren’t trained on the PUA program.

The Pandemic Unemployment Assistance program in Oregon fielded more than 90,000 claims in the first seven weeks after its launch but paid fewer than 3,000 a week on average. That resulted in the enormous backlog of 65,000 unprocessed claims.

The department has paid more than $90 million in those benefits but owes many times that. Newly hired employees tasked with processing Pandemic Unemployment Assistance claims say training has been uneven and complain the department is putting limits on what they can do to help clients.

The department continues working with Google on a new, web-based PUA application system that would work more efficiently. It hopes to roll that out by the middle of this month.

The department began focusing on PUA claims at the end of June. It hoped to process 5,000 of the outstanding 70,000 PUA claims last week but fell 600 claims short of its goal. It hopes to process 7,500 claims this week and to process a greater number of claims in each successive week.

Even if the department meets those goals, it won’t work through its PUA backlog before the second week of August.

Why aren’t Pandemic Unemployment Assistance claimants getting their full benefits?Claimants are entitled to $600 a week through July 31, a bonus Congress established for all unemployed people. They are additionally entitled to at least $205 a week in benefits — more if they earned a higher income when they were working.

In most cases, Oregon is only paying out the minimum — $805 a week — for new claimants. It is then going back to adjust payments upwards. The department says it is working to go back through past cases and update payments.

Why does Oregon use gross wages rather than net wages to calculate PUA benefits, and why does it matter?

Oregon uses net income to calculate the maximum amount that a Pandemic Unemployment Assistance claimant is eligible for each week, but asks claimants to provide their gross income on their weekly reports to determine how much to pay that claimant in that given week. In practice, this means that if self-employed or contract workers earn any money for their services during a given week — even if their earnings go directly to the overhead costs of their businesses — their payout for that week will be impacted.

Gerstenfeld has said that the state is following federal requirements by using gross income to calculate what a claimant is owned in a given week. He said the state is seeking guidance from the federal government to confirm that they must use gross income to calculate that payout.

A spokesman for the Department of Labor confirmed that states are required to use gross income to determine a claimant’s payout each week. The spokesman said the department is in the process of issuing clarifying guidance on this to states that may not be following the federal guidelines.

How many Work Share claims are pending?Thousands and thousands. But the actual number isn’t clear.

Work Share is a state program designed to help employers retain skilled workers through temporary downturns. Employers apply on behalf of their workers and, when those workers get their hours and wages cut, the state steps in to make up some of the lost wages.

Work Share, like every element of Oregon’s unemployment claims system, has been overwhelmed during the pandemic. The employment department says it takes eight weeks to pay claims.

While 15,000 Work Share claims have been paid, many thousands of Work Share participants haven’t. The employment department doesn’t know how many are waiting for their money.

“We have to manually count the number of applications, which requires staff time (and time away from processing applications),” department communications specialist Ariane Le Chevallier wrote in an email. She said the department hopes to have an estimate next week, and is trying to automate more of the Work Share claims process.

Why is it still so hard to get through on the phone?Many benefits cannot be paid until claimants talk to a claims processor on the phone to resolve problems — but the employment department’s phone lines have been jammed throughout the pandemic.

That’s partly because of the huge volume of calls and partly because the department hasn’t implemented a formal call-back system, the way many private companies do during times of high call volume.

The department says the call volumes are so high it cannot effectively implement a call-back system so its phone lines have been a free-for-all since March.

The employment department says the pressure on the phone lines have been exacerbated by auto-dialing programs people use to call repeatedly and by people calling repeatedly to check on claims.

Exasperated, unemployed workers say they don’t know what else to do to get their benefits.

What else can you do if you can’t get your claim resolved?Consider contacting your state representative and state senator. Oregon has an online tool to identify the lawmakers who represent you and the employment department has liaisons working with lawmakers to help resolve constituent claims.

Legislators have oversight authority for the employment department and some are in regular communication with the department. Some lawmakers have worked assiduously to help constituents get their benefits – but many are, like the employment department, overwhelmed by the volume of calls.

When will Oregon waive the ‘waiting week’?It will be months, at least — and the state has left open the possibility it may not be able to implement the waiver in time to meet a Dec. 31 federal deadline.

Unemployed people usually have to be out of work for a week before they are eligible for benefits. That is, there are normally no payments for the first week people are out of a job.

Congress changed that in March, providing federal money to waive that waiting week and pay benefits for that first week people are out of a job.

The employment department’s antiquated computers couldn’t make the change, though, and the department initially said Oregon would not waive the waiting week. It soon became obvious that decision would cost jobless Oregonians hundreds of millions of dollars in federal benefits.

So, under congressional pressure, the governor reversed course and said the state would waive the waiting week — eventually.

That still hasn’t happened, though, because the department has prioritized other claims ahead of the waiting week. Oregon now owes laid-off workers several hundred million dollars for that waiting week — equal to 25% of all the benefits it has paid.

If Oregon doesn’t meet the end-of-year deadline, it risks forfeiting the federal money. That could cost jobless Oregonians hundreds of millions of dollars.