California has a new unemployment and disability payment contractor after the state’s multi-billion-dollar pandemic fraud panic. The Employment Development Department hopes it will be the end of an era of brazen scams, which wreaked havoc for laid-off workers and fueled police busts involving stacks of ill-gotten debit cards issued at the department’s direction by then-contractor Bank of America.
EDD tells CalMatters that on Monday it plans to begin notifying 850,000 benefit recipients of the new payment provider: Money Network, an electronic payment company owned by finance tech company Fiserv. Money Network may sound familiar; it was also tapped by the federal government and Gov. Gavin Newsom to pay out COVID-era stimulus funds, which attracted its own waves of debit card scams.
Money Network won the EDD contract after a competitive bidding process. It comes as the agency embarks on a five-year, $1.2 billion tech overhaul known as EDDNext.
The contract will primarily be paid for through a debit card revenue-sharing agreement, similar to the EDD’s previous deal with Bank of America. The agency will also pay $32 million over five years for Money Network to offer a long-discussed direct deposit option to workers’ bank accounts, which the EDD says will launch in spring 2024.
In mid-January, people receiving unemployment, disability and paid leave benefits from the EDD will be mailed new Money Network debit cards. Payments will officially begin on these cards on Feb. 15. Anyone who still has a Bank of America EDD debit card will have until April 15, 2024, to spend the money.
In the meantime, fraud analysts tracking an uptick in attacks on government benefit debit cards — not just California’s unemployment program, but also food assistance and others — will be watching to see what lessons have (or haven’t) been learned from the pandemic. The new EDD cards will include both security chips and tap-to-pay options common in consumer credit cards.
Still, the EDD is advising cardholders to be vigilant: “Beware of scammers. We will never request your personal information by text message, e-mail or on social media.”
Learn more about what went wrong during the pandemic in Lauren’s year-long investigation.
Speaking of delayed relief: Tens of thousands of Californians are still awaiting aid from the COVID-19 rent relief program. But as CalMatters housing reporter Ben Christopher explains, the program may run out of money before it can help the remaining eligible applicants.
The $5.2 billion program launched in 2021 to help Californians pay down rental debt they accumulated during the pandemic. Though it stopped taking new applications in 2022, more than 70,000 households still have applications pending. The program has enough funding to cover a little more than 14,000 people — meaning the remaining 80% of the total applicant pool is out of luck.
That’s devastating news for tenants and landlords alike who may ultimately wait in vain for relief to come. As one graphic designer and single mother told Ben: “I’m trying to find a way to freelance or do whatever I can do to get the money to just pay it myself… I can’t sit and depend on it and wait because it’s been two years.”
