State Unemployment Advantages Chief Resigns Amid EDD Cost Backlog – CBS San Francisco
SACRAMENTO (AP) — California’s troubled unemployment benefits division will soon have its third director in the last two years.
The head of the employment promotion department, Rita Saenz, resigned on Friday after a little more than a year in office. She will be replaced by Nancy Farias, who has served as the department’s associate director since 2020. She will earn a salary of $204,613.
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Saenz, who ran the California Department of Human Services in the early 2000s and a former executive at Xerox Corp. came out of retirement in 2021 to run the ministry as it was plagued by fraud and arrears. The department was overwhelmed with unemployment benefits early in the pandemic after Gov. Gavin Newsom issued the country’s first statewide stay-at-home order, which forced businesses to close.
Since then, the agency has received 26.4 million applications and paid $180 billion in benefits. But about $20 billion of those payments went to scammers posing as prison inmates and, in one case, to US Senator Dianne Feinstein to trick state officials into sending them checks.
As director, Saenz attempted to implement 21 recommendations from the California auditor. The department has so far implemented five of these recommendations, while the rest are in various stages of implementation. In a memo announcing her retirement, Saenz said she only planned to stay in the department for a short time.
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“I am proud of the many reforms and new programs that EDD has introduced over the past year,” Saenz said in a department press release. “Nancy Farias has the energy and direct experience to sustain this positive momentum.”
Newsom praised Saenz for her “steadfast leadership” and credited her with leading “important reforms at the ministry to better serve working Californians, prevent fraud, and hold bad actors accountable.”
The department recently uncovered another fraud scheme, when scammers posed as doctors to trick state officials into issuing them disability cards. The department froze about 345,000 applications related to 27,000 doctors. Earlier this week, the department announced that about 98% of those claims were fraudulent.
However, the department has frozen the benefits of some eligible claimants who have had trouble reinstating their benefits.
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“The EDD has tried so hard to downplay its recent failure to prevent fraud in its disability programs,” said Assemblyman Jim Patterson, a Fresno Republican who has been a vocal critic of the department. “The governor needs to put someone in charge of the EDD who has the courage to make the necessary changes.”
