Nevada unemployment site down Saturday, expanded benefits coming
Nevada’s unemployment site will be temporarily down Saturday as the system is readied to process the expanded unemployment benefits offered under the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act, also known as CARES.
The Department of Employment, Training and Rehabilitation said Friday evening the website will be down from 1 p.m. to midnight to “conduct system enhancements and take steps towards the fast-track implementation of the federal CARES Act.”
Any unemployment insurance functions such as filing claims will not be available. The department is encouraging filers to visit the website after midnight, when the site will be functional.
Details on what the enhancements will entail were not disclosed, but department spokesperson Rosa Mendez said this week it was working to introduce a new system to process the expanded unemployment benefits after receiving federal guidelines last weekend.
Those guidelines directed states with the financial, operating and reporting instructions it must follow as the provisions under the CARES Act, and other federal relief bills, are 100 percent federally funded.
These long-awaited benefits include offering unemployment insurance to independent contractors, self-employed and gig workers as well as an additional $600 a week for claimaints and 13 additional weeks of beneifts for those who have reached the state’s maximum benefits allowance of 26 weeks.
The move should finally bring some relief to the nearly quarter-million Nevadans that have filed claims for unemployment insurance in the past three weeks, and the thousands of indepedent contractors that have been waiting to be able to file their initial claim.
Nevada reported 79,865 new unemployment claims last week, nearly 8,000 more claims than the week before, according to Thursday figures from the Department of Labor.
DETR reported earlier Friday there have been 271,533 initial claims filed in 2020 as of last week, 28,417 more than the state saw in the last two years combined.
Nationally, just over 6.6 million people sought jobless benefits last week resulting in the largest number of job losses since 1948.
Contact Subrina Hudson at shudson@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0340. Follow @SubrinaH on Twitter.