Appeals board hears monthly workload numbers; managers say some DOL timeliness targets are close but others lag

At its Feb. 18 meeting, the Unemployment Insurance Appeals Board received monthly workload updates from agency judges and supervisors, who said recent months show improving throughput but mixed compliance with Department of Labor (DOL) timeliness guidelines.

Judge Koutre summarized field-office metrics: "In January, daily appeal intake, remained flat ... that's about 580 appeals a day we receive," he said, adding that field offices issued just under 15,000 decisions in January — about 1,100 more than December — and that the overall UI appeals inventory fell to 12,784 cases. He said the average case age for field offices closed the month at 28.6 days, inside the DOL target of 30 days, and that staff closed 71.5% of cases within 45 days (short of the DOL guideline of 80%) and only 22.3% within 30 days (the 60% benchmark).

Rebecca Bock, the supervisor administrative law judge for appellate operations, said appellate-level numbers are generally meeting or near DOL targets. "For the month of January, we closed 55.7 percent of our cases within 45 days, bringing our year end total to 48.6," she said, and noted the 75-day measure was above guidelines year-to-date.

Both presenters tied the recent improvements to changes in case handling and the CAMS implementation, which allows redistributing workload across offices. Judge Koutre said the office moved 1,750 cases in January to better match cases with available hearing capacity.

What happens next: managers said they will continue reporting monthly metrics and will provide an April update on DOL compliance measures as the DOL evaluation year closing date of March 31 approaches.