By: Howard Riell
New Yorkers want their unemployment money, which explains the monstrous line forming every day at a Key Bank ATM on East 22nd Street.
The line routinely stretches around a block and keeps money-hungry citizens waiting for as long as two hours, according to those standing and waiting.
“The weary individuals risk catching the coronavirus, in part, because the state issued them — and thousands of other city residents — debit cards for unemployment benefits through KeyBank, which has only a single branch and ATM in the entire city. The branch in Flatiron is closed due to COVID-19, but one ATM is open,” the New York Post reported. “Some said they endured the line and rolled the dice on their health to avoid getting gouged with surcharges at out-of-network banks. Others said the KeyBank machine was the only one where they could get a daily maximum withdrawal of $1,500. And some simply didn’t know that the bank was part of a network of 1,000 ATMs — because neither the state nor the bank told them when they sent the “Key2Benefits” cards.”
“No one could have predicted the wave of unemployment applications that crashed over the United States because of the COVID-19 pandemic, and every state is struggling — but New York has moved faster than any other state to address our backlog and get money into New Yorkers’ hands. To date, we have paid out over $10 billion dollars during this crisis, compared to just $2.1 billion in total last year,” NYS Labor Commissioner Roberta Reardon said late last month. “Those claims that have been outstanding for weeks are ones that we simply cannot process — we have already attempted to contact all of these New Yorkers, and we will continue to try get in touch with everyone who applied so we can connect them with the benefits they are eligible for.”
Dissatisfaction is rampant, and with good reason. cbs6albany.com in Albany quoted many residents in calling the state’s unemployment division a “broken system! That’s what many New Yorkers are saying about the New York State’s unemployment process. It’s estimated thousands of unemployed New Yorkers who filed when the pandemic first started still have not seen unemployment benefits.”
During a recent press conference, NY Governor Andrew Cuomo offered a variety of alibis for the slow processing. For example, he said that part of the reason that payments for New Yorkers were taking so long is the caution being exercised to see to it the state does not get cheated. “It’s all on the other side of a computer, and you are giving out billions of dollars in this country. So be careful that you are not being subjective to some kind of computer fraud in responding to ‘Susie Smith,’ but there is no ‘Susie Smith.’ Susie Smith is really a computer terminal in some other country.”
