Kansas Governor Laura Kelly said progress is being made toward updating the state’s outdated Unemployment Insurance system at the Department of Labor.
The agency issued its request for proposal for modernizing the over 40 year old computer system.
In a press release issued Tuesday, Governor Kelly said “When I learned that the previous Administration abandoned efforts to modernize the state’s unemployment computer system in 2011, I immediately tasked the agency with reviving its modernization plans. Unfortunately the pandemic hit, and the antiquated technology was unable to keep up with the record volume of claims.”
Prior to the pandemic, Department of Labor staff had traveled to states that had modernized their unemployment systems to learn how Kansas could construct a more efficient system of their own that would serve businesses and claimants with greater ease.
KDOL Secretary Amber Shultz said that the agency’s systems were not equipped to handle the amount of pandemic related claims or the complexity of new federal programs, but that over the past year they have been able to at least “stabilize” their underlying systems. These stabilization efforts, she said, will help to speed up the process to modernize their systems once a vendor is chosen.
When Governor Kelly took office in 2019, one of her top prioritize for the KDOL was to update the agency’s archaic mainframe system, but the pandemic thwarted any efforts to do so. The focus instead turned to stabilizing the system.
