Secrets of
the
The EDD in
Choosing your New Occupation
The occupational training you choose is critical. The training program must be approved by the EDD. The training facility will know which courses qualify. Professions in IT and health are the most promising. See the bls.gov website for a list of the fastest growing professions. Your new profession does not have to be related to your current profession. What is important is that your chances of finding work in the new profession is much higher than for your current profession. If it is determined there is a sufficient demand in your current labor market for your current skills and experience you will be disqualified. Fuzzy job titles can sometimes be an asset.
Starting the Approval Process
Because the funds are short,
very little information is made available, the CTB is
described on the EDD website in a short two-page handout. http://www.edd.ca.gov/taxrep/de8714u.pdf
. The detailed rules appear to be a well-kept secret and if any of them is
broken, all benefits may be terminated unexpectedly. The EDD does not like to
answer questions about how to qualify. They want to ask you all the questions
so they can find any excuse to turn you down. Whether you qualify is done by a
scheduled determination telephone interview. If you call your CTB office
(assigned to claimant based on SSN), you will be asked to sign up for the training
before the interview is granted. The sign up is the first step in the approval
process. You then call back saying you have signed up.
A phone appointment letter will be mailed to you giving the time and date that
they will call to qualify or disqualify you. If you miss the call, you will be
disqualified so it is critical to check your mail every day. I know someone who
got a phone appointment letter the same day as the appointment,
he missed the call and found a message on his answering machine saying that he
was disqualified. I personally came within minutes of missing such a call. The
postmark on the letter showed that it was mailed one week earlier from
The Questions
In the interview you will be asked to answer a long series of questions about the training program you have chosen and your employment background. Before the interview starts, be sure to ask for the name of the interviewer and the spelling of their name.
You will be asked for your
name, address and SSN. You will be asked for your drivers
license number and it will be verified with the DMV. You will be asked why you
left your last job, what your profession was and how long you were in that
profession. Two years is adequate. You will be asked why you are choosing the
type of training you signed up for. You know that you want a stable job in a
field where the demand for workers is high. You may be asked if you would be willing
to abandon or alter your school schedule if offered work and we all know how
important it is to find work. Guidelines for this question can be found here: http://www.edd.ca.gov/uibdg/uaa40.htm
. You will be asked when your last job ended. Timing is critical. Generally you
must start the approval process for the class you intend to take within a
window 4 to 16 weeks after the time you EDD payments start, but mass layoffs
may mitigate the 4 week waiting period. You will be asked for details of the
training, the name of the class, the day it starts, the day it ends, where the
facility is located, the phone number of someone there who can verify your
enrollment, how many hours a week you will be in class, the hours and days the
class will meet. You want to be a full-time student (at least 20 hours per week
or 12 or more units per semester/quarter) so that you can study hard for your
challenging new career. Some classes have labs that can cut into the rest of
the day. You will not have time left over for a part-time job. At the end of
the interview be sure to ask when you will know if you have been approved. The
training facility must be located in
The EDD asserts that a claimant may not receive payments for more than 52 weeks, period. Since you may not normally even apply for the benefit until you have received payments for four weeks you will not receive benefits for more than 48 weeks assuming that you were so fortunate have your desired training synchronize for you. In reality most people will only be paid for 40 weeks or less if they can qualify at all. The will of the legislature to allow 52 weeks of training is being spurned by administrators in the EDD who block this from happening. Judges can and do overturn the artificial 52 week payment limit.
Approval depends on Attendance
Once approved you must be diligent in your studies. If you stop attending your training program you will lose your benefits under the CTB program. The back side of each unemployment insurance claim form has a spot where your instructor must sign that your progress is satisfactory before it is mailed in. If you are on break, check the break box. A CTB recess can not be more than three weeks. Also you need to be aware that there are no paid sick days while on CTB. If you don’t make it to class because of illness, you will be docked for the time you are not in class. Instructors are told not to sign the back of your slip if you are gone for a day. Attendance records in the registrars office are audited for absences by EDD employees that visit the school.
The utla.net website gives this additional advice for its union members: “YOU MAY NOT BE ELIGIBLE for unemployment in any week that you make yourself unavailable for work for more than 4 hours. … If you apply for unemployment benefits during a week in which you were unavailable for any reason, other than illness, not only could your eligibility for collecting unemployment for that week be in question and denied, but for subsequent weeks as well . According to EDD's A Guide to Benefits and Employment Services: If you refused work, you will be scheduled for an interview to determine your continued eligibility for benefits. To avoid any potential disqualification of benefits do not apply for benefits for any week you turned down work for any reason other than illness.” Some instructors consider job interviews an acceptable part of the curriculum. If you plan to go on a job interview or to a job fair, this activity might not be considered an absence, check with your instructor in advance to determine local policy.
Another trick that the EDD could potentially use to disqualify you is that they will often send you a letter scheduling you for a telephone interview during the hours that your class is in session. Be sure you explain to your instructor that your absence on such days is mandated by law and that you should not be marked as absent, show your appointment notification letter as evidence.
Hidden Deadlines are Deadly
There are two mean tricks here used to deny benefits. They are all about timing. The appointment for a telephone determination interview is sent in the mail, it takes about a week from the time you request it until the time you are called. The determination paperwork takes about two weeks to process before you know if you are accepted. The total time is about three weeks. Pre-registration at a regional occupational center happens two weeks before the class starts if you sign up on the first day. If you attend the first week of class before you are approved to do so, you can lose your unemployment benefits. To remedy this situation call the CTB phone number and ask to speak to the supervisor for the person who interviewed you. Explain the Catch-22 time crunch and ask for an expedited determination.
The second timing problem is "the training has ended" trick. If you aren't proactive here you could find your payments cut off for at least two months before they are reinstated by an administrative law appeals judge. In the telephone determination interview they will ask for an exact start and stop date for the class. If a training program lasts for several semesters at a regional occupational center, the exact date of the end of the second or third semester will never be known. You will have to give the end of the first semester as the end of training and apply for a training extension as soon as you know when the next semester will end. No notice will be sent warning you or reminding you about this important new date. Many of the deadlines imposed by the EDD are not based on statute, they are administratively declared. If you do nothing, you get a notice saying that you did not apply for an extension soon enough and your checks will stop coming. Another letter will come denying you benefits because "the training has ended." You must pre-register at the earliest possible date for the second semester and call the CTB office that day to initiate an extension determination interview in which they will probably ask most of the same questions they asked the first time. Offer to mail them verification from the instructor about your enrollment and the duration of the training program. Be sure the letter addresses any unresolved issues. The FAX machine at the CTB office is a VERY unreliable way to reach employees. If an expected FAX is not received, no employee will ever call you back and ask you to send it again. They will simply disqualify you. Registered mail is the best method. Be sure that your name and SSN is on any document you send to them. Be sure the registrar at your training facility has a signed "Release of training information" form on file so that when the EDD calls to verify your enrollment, an answer will be given. It is best to go to the registrars office, ask who handles incoming calls from the EDD and hand the form to them personally.
As mentioned earlier you must start the approval process for the class you intend to take within a 12 week window. This is a deadline established by statute and is inherently unfair to many applicants because semesters are frequently spaced 20 weeks apart and if the date you were laid off falls just after the beginning of a semester, you may not be able to synchronize your training to start soon enough for you to be eligible. In a situation like this training at a private academy may be your only option and expensive funding like that is often withheld due to lack of funds. The fiscal year for fresh funding money starts in July.
If you find that some of your checks are missing, you may be out of luck. EDD will not allow you to see an audit printout of your account. They will simply say that all checks have been issued and we show that all of them have been cashed. End of story, no accountability. There is a way to report fraud by submitting a Fraud Reporting Form on-line or calling 800-229-6297 if you feel someone else is intercepting your checks and cashing them.
Paid Tuitions
The EDD worksource office you go to is important if you would like the EDD to finance expensive training at a private facility. Each office will have its own pool of money for private training and many offices will use up the money early while others may have money left over months later. There are dozens of offices listed on the EDD website by city and by county-
http://www.edd.ca.gov/jsrep/jscnty.htm
. You do not have to use the one nearest you, you can
go to any of them. You can canvas by phone and see who has training funds left
and plan accordingly. The EDD provides an online database of approved training institutions
and courses on their website: State
of California's Eligible Training Provider List. The list is badly
out-of-date since the state does not provide any way for the training vendors
to make updates or corrections. This means the only way you can know what is
really available is to contact a list of the most promising schools and ask
each one for an appointment where you can discuss your training needs. Don’t be
surprised to find price tags in the $5000-$10000 range. Paid tuition programs
are separate from the California Training Benefit which does not allow payment
for tuition, books, or supplies.
The Hidden Rules
There is a CTB Fact Finding Guide to help EDD employees ask important questions: http://www.edd.ca.gov/uibdg/umi85ff.htm and www.edd.ca.gov/uibdg/umi85.htm .
It would be wise to read these two documents carefully before planning for a new career or placing any calls to the EDD that will start the approval process. The full text of the California Unemployment Insurance Code as it relates to retraining is here:
http://www.leginfo.ca.gov/cgi-bin/displaycode?section=uic&group=01001-02000&file=1266-1274.10 and the Benefit Determination Guide discusses the complex underlying case law used by the EDD to construct its general unemployment applicant eligibility requirements.
Appeals
If you are disqualified, you have the right to appeal that decision and a form will be sent to you for that purpose. Fill it out promptly and return it after retaining a copy for yourself. Monitor the progress of the form to the office and from the office to the court. What should reasonably take less than a week often takes several weeks. Sometimes documents get lost in the mail and need to be resent. This takes prodding. When you make your first call to the CTB to verify your appeal was received, ask for the phone number of the court. In most cases you and the judge will be the only ones in the hearing room and the hearing will be tape recorded, the EDD does not usually send a representative to defend its decision. Do not be surprised if the department initially ignores the decision of the court. Once you receive a ruling in your favor, call the EDD immediately and ask for appeals. They will ask you to FAX the decision to them so they can start processing it immediately, be sure to do a follow-up call to verify that the FAX was received. Don’t be bashful about asking them to walk over to the FAX machine while you wait, just say you are not in a hurry but need to know whether to send it again. They will find it if they are looking for it.
Case law: you should be aware that the full text of CUIAB (appeals board) precedent decisions are available free online conveniently indexed by subject at www.cuiab.ca.gov/precedent_decisions.shtm. Precedent benefit decision No. P-B-482 in particular is an important ruling to CTB recipients. It reverses the EDD criteria used for many disqualifications and the spirit of the decision along with its legal citations is the potential foundation for many appeals.
Other Possible Benefits
The California Training Benefit is available to a broad spectrum of EDD unemployment insurance recipients. There are a number of other special categories of workers that also qualify for other funding such as veterans, disabled workers, injured workers needing rehabilitation, etc. There are programs based on the Workforce Investment Act (WIA) & Trade Adjustment Assistance (TAA).
Termination is their Middle Name.
A big problem with dealing with the EDD benefits personnel is that they are not trained as a customer service organization where customer satisfaction has value. They seem to be staffed mostly by moody, disgruntled, language-challenged misanthropes whose goal is to hang up as quickly as possible. There is a big morale problem in the department. The attitude corresponds to one where employees are rewarded for disqualifying as many recipients as possible regardless of the consequences to the lives and careers of those they are being paid to serve. This upside-down attitude results in untold human suffering, homelessness, unnecessary financial stress and outright cruelty. Forewarned is forearmed. If you do not have a sense of the rules that govern your interaction with their department you could be the next casualty of the steamroller philosophy in place there. If you are told to show up and post your resume on their computer, you had better be able to read and write, type, use a word processor and get there on time or you may find your checks cut off. “Benefits are denied beginning with the Sunday of the week that the claimant was required to add or update a resume in the Job Service's CalJOBS system and continuing until the week the claimant adds or updates an unsuppressed resume in CalJOBS.”
By the way never use whiteout on a claim form, they will throw it away and mail you a blank one so you can resubmit it. Form processing is entirely automated, no person reads the forms. Fill them out VERY carefully or payments will be delayed or even denied.
The EDD goes out of their way to discourage people from contacting them by erecting barriers to prevent recipients in their tracks. The most blatant wall is their toll-free phone number. For years they have understaffed their phones and refused to purchase enough phone lines for the public to reach them in a timely manner. EDD managers quantify phone center behaviors and include them in personnel files creating a form big brother quota atmosphere. Once a recipient has run this gauntlet, they never want to call the EDD again for any reason. It is an exercise in frustration. This call volume fiasco is a form of continued abuse and demonstrates a clear intent not to serve the public need.
EDD
Unemployment Toll-Free Telephone Numbers:
It
is best to call before
Try
to find a phone with a redial button before you start calling.
Write
down the sequence of numbers in the menus that will route your call correctly.
Allow
at least 15-30 minutes for continually redialing the number.
If
you have a disability that prevents such cruel and inhuman punishment, then
call
the toll-free Department of Justice ADA enforcement number at 800-514-0301.
Turn in the thugs that run the EDD torture machine.
English
1-800-300-5616
Spanish
1-800-326-8937
Cantonese
1-800-547-3506
Mandarin
1-866-303-0706
Vietnamese
1-800-547-2058
TTY
(Non Voice) 1-800-815-9387
Hard
of Hearing emails WPSFP@edd.ca.gov
EDD
Web site for general information: www.edd.ca.gov
EDD Information (916) 653-0707
San Bernardino CTB office, Box 641, 92402 (909) 383-4663 or 383-4531
Judges
have been very timid about chastising the EDD for this abuse. They will just
tell claimants who can not reach the EDD by phone to go to the EDD website and
get an address to write the EDD or send them an e-mail. This entirely fanciful
idea has no basis in fact. Such judges are grossly misinformed. There is no
email address that unemployment claimants can use to
reach the EDD unless you are hard of hearing and their street address at 800
Capitol Mall is only listed for parts of the site dealing with employers, not claimants.
EDD 800 Capitol Mall,
EDD
EDD Telephone Roster
/ Staff Directory of EDD found on
another state site.
There
is a placebo form that sometimes works at:
https://eapply4ui.edd.ca.gov/eddcomm/asp/frmEDDCOMM.aspx
It lets you select from about 30 message subcategories
for the category “Unemployment Insurance Benefits” You can Request a Claim
Form, ask for paperwork from a Claim Filed Online, respond to a few basic
common problems via customer service, but you may not send queries about Extensions,
being Disqualified or CTB. There are other topics as well where it blocks you
from sending an inquiry message.
Ever since Nixon devised demonizing the poor as a political strategy to divide the country, administrations have continued to make it un-American to be at the bottom of the economic ladder. Attitudes of appointees who run civil service agencies come from the top down, sort of an unspoken “war against grime.” The recruitment and training of EDD employees fits the mold of the mindset of those in charge.
Caveat Lector and legal disclaimer: The information contained in this Web site is for general guidance on matters of public interest only. The application and impact of laws can vary widely based on the specific facts involved. Given the changing nature of laws, rules and regulations, and the inherent hazards of electronic communication, there are guaranteed to be delays, omissions or inaccuracies in information contained in this site. Accordingly, the information on this site is provided with the understanding that I am not engaged in rendering legal, accounting, tax, or other professional advice and services. As such, my reading of the sources cited should not be used as a substitute for consultation with professional accounting, tax, legal or other competent advisers. Before making any decision or taking any action, you should consult a professional. The information sources for the generalizations presented here are cited and readers are encouraged to consult them directly for the best understanding of the intricate issues involved. I will not be liable for any direct, indirect, consequential, special, exemplary, or other damages arising therefrom.
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Old News Note:
False claims to the state for
unemployment insurance have ripped off an estimated $16 million over the last
five years, according to investigators. The Fresno Bee reported (
No major newspaper has ever seen fit to write an article about the California Training Benefit as of this writing in 2008. It would be very interesting to know what percent of CTB applicants are denied benefits.
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