ORLANDO, Fla. — The Florida Department of Economic Opportunity has denied more than 267,000 people of unemployment benefits since March 15.
New numbers show that 40.3% of claims were denied from March 15 through this weekend.
The numbers show that 80.6 % of the claims have been processed with more than $523 million paid out.
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Channel 9 has received hundreds of calls and comments from people in Central Florida that are struggling to get help from the overloaded system.
Many people say their claims were denied when they logged back in. In many cases, people were told they didn't earn enough money to qualify for unemployment.
To qualify, the state only requires a worker to have made $3,400 over the past 12 months.
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You can appeal, but some people told us they've had problems doing that as well.
Local worker who claim to be unable to get benefits include, hotel workers, Disney cast members, restaurant staff, department store workers and hairstylists.
“DEO will be conducting nightly maintenance to the CONNECT (online unemployment) system to process claims and payments faster,” according to a new release from the Department of Economic Opportunity. “CONNECT will be available from 8 a.m. to 7:59 p.m. daily. This schedule does not affect individuals that wish to file a new claim.”
On Friday, the Florida Department of Economic Opportunity took its CONNECT website offline to process claims. That downtime resulted in DEO increasing its processing rate from 30% to 79.1%, it also resulted in denials increasing from 27.6% to 40.3%.
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The website took longer than expected to open back up Monday morning, but eventually came back online.
The state processed more than 300,000 unemployment claims and payments while its website was unavailable.