Leadership: Department Director Nancy Farias, who is EDD’s former chief deputy director. Chief Information Officer Rita Gass, the former CIO at the California Secretary of State’s Office.
Budget: $20.3 billion, with rounding.
Total staff: Nearly 10,000.
A state department that’s intimately familiar to millions of California’s nearly 25 million adults is delivering on its commitment to improve customer service with an ongoing technology modernization.
The California Employment Development Department (EDD) is, like the California Department of Motor Vehicles, among the state’s most-recognizable departments, and one of its most used and most relied upon by residents. (Find Industry Insider — California’s Profiles in Government entry on the DMV here.) EDD is utilized by many millions of employers and employees alike every year via its Employment Services, Unemployment Insurance, State Disability Insurance, Workforce Development, and Labor Market Information programs. EDD is the state’s largest tax collection agency and spearheads the collecting, accounting and auditing of payroll taxes; and keeps employment records on nearly 17 million workers in the state. It’s also physically one of the state’s largest departments, serving more than 18 million Californians via hundreds of offices statewide.
California’s newly enacted 2022-2023 Fiscal Year state budget, which took effect July 1, includes $136 million for the department’s EDDNext project, the department’s “comprehensive modernization initiative,” per the budget. This will replace legacy systems with a new benefits system that is “modular, flexible, and customer-oriented” and improve customer service processes. In an email to Industry Insider — California, an EDD spokesman characterized the project as a “major effort” and said funding will be used in areas including improving call centers, simplifying forms and notices, developing data analysis tools “to continue curbing fraudulent benefit claims,” and upgrading training and tools to speed up application processing. The first-ever EDDNext Vendor Day in August focused on customer-centric services.
“We are always looking to strike the right balance between blocking fraud and speeding the process for claimants,” the spokesman said. Elsewhere in EDD’s budget, it will receive $96.3 million, including $86 million from the General Fund, to continue ongoing vendor contracts in “anti-fraud, usability, and modernization”; $23.5 million from the General Fund to preserve “expanded information technology staffing levels”; and $10.2 million from the General Fund to improve cybersecurity resilience.
At an Industry Insider — California Member Briefing in July, Rita Gass told moderator Alan Cox, Industry Insider — California’s publisher and executive vice president of parent company e.Republic, that the department is “working on establishing a cybersecurity division” during FY 2022-2023. EDD is also investing in a new customer experience division under the department’s Public Affairs Branch, Gass said; and is establishing a Transformation Office to support the implementation of EDDNext.
The department began working with Virginia cybersecurity firm ID.me in October 2020, with a new online identity verification system to speed up claims processing; but in response to subsequent questions from the state’s nonpartisan Legislative Analyst’s Office and others about the company’s analysis, EDD Director Nancy Farias told an Assembly subcommittee earlier this year the department is “certainly looking” at different ways to verify identities other than facial recognition. The company, EDD’s spokesman said, “has taken action in response to concerns raised to increase customer control over users’ private information.” A recent contract between ID.me and the Internal Revenue Service, the spokesman said, may serve as a guide on identity and interaction parameters.
“[The] FBI recently issued a warning about job board scams to impersonate businesses so we are looking to ways to use ID.me without facial recognition similar to what [the] IRS is doing,” the spokesman said, noting ID.me is required to meet all state and federal laws — including California’s own privacy protection statutes.
In partnership with the Legislature, EDD has “been aggressively investing in improving customer service,” the spokesman said. This includes:
- Calling customers direct from the remote virtual call center when clarifications are needed to resolve claims; and deploying a new feature that lets customers save their place “in line,” eliminating the need for call center callers to remain on hold.
- Being more mobile-responsive by enhancing the mobile version of EDD’s website to enable claim filing and information access; and adding the ability to upload documents via desktop and mobile.
- Launching a new tool through the Unemployment Insurance Online application that lets claimants get more information on claim status.
