About 15,000 independent contractors, gig workers and self-employed business owners applied for unemployment benefits on a new platform the state launched Monday, according to the Colorado Department of Labor and Employment.
“I thought we would see more traffic into the system,” said Cher Haavind, a spokeswoman for the CDLE, noting the system had been stress-tested to handle twice as many claims. “We had plenty of bandwidth.”
Technology-wise, the system held up well, Haavind said, and was able to avoid the chaos that overwhelmed the original system in the middle of March. Given this is the first time independent workers have been allowed to file, people had questions about required documents and how the state viewed wages.
The system struggled to deal with people who had both W-2 wages from a regular job and 1099 income from contract work. An example would be someone who held a retail job, and then drove for a ridesharing service during evenings or weekends. The state will try to better explain some of the terms it is using.
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“It might show in our system that you are getting full wages,” she said. “We didn’t plan for that scenario.”
Read more via The Denver Post.
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