“The department’s Employment and Training Administration regional offices worked with the affected states to monitor the impacts of this issue in these three states,” DOL’s Vereen said. Systems in Louisiana, Nebraska, and Tennessee-which rely on GSI for claims processing-went offline as a result of the breach, affecting at least 23,000 people seeking to recertify their benefits for another week.Īccording to both the DOL and GSI, those three state systems are now back online. The DOL was first notified of the disruption on June 28, saying, “No state has reported to ETA that personally identifiable information has been compromised.” “If a state system goes down they can’t turn to another state, they can’t turn to the federal government, there’s no other way to get people benefits.” States Affected “It does point out some important issues,” said Andrew Stettner, a senior fellow at the Century Foundation, a think tank. While the federal government sets the general structure of how programs should work and pays for states to administer unemployment benefits, each state makes its own rules and operates its own system. It also underscores the challenges policymakers have faced shoring up state workforce systems. The Labor Department’s referral of the event to its IG comes as the DOL and state agencies are working to modernize the jobless safety net after at least $163 billion in unemployment funds were defrauded from state systems during the pandemic, and delays caused months-long waits for applicants to receive benefits.
The DOL’s Employment and Training Administration, which oversees the federal-state unemployment system, has since “notified the department’s Office of Inspector General of the cybersecurity event experienced by some UI state agencies,” DOL spokesperson Monica Vereen said in a statement. had their job search or part of their unemployment insurance systems offline for a period of time within the last three weeks after the company detected “anomalous activity” and shut down its network. The hack of an unemployment insurance technology company that disrupted more than a dozen state agencies’ systems caught the attention of the US Department of Labor and its independent watchdog.Īnd although the system outages were short-lived, the incident reiterates the importance of best practices within the unemployment system, such as states performing independent cybersecurity audits and having backup systems to keep paying benefits if their main systems go offline.Īt least 18 states that contract with Florida-based Geographic Solutions Inc.
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