Duval County

Download Florida’s unemployment paper application here

By Lorena Inclán, Action News Jax
By Lorena Inclán, Action News Jax

JACKSONVILLE, Fla. — The Florida agency in charge of unemployment claims is now apologizing for its broken website.

The Florida Department of Economic Opportunity said it’ll go back to paper applications.

CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD THE PAPER APPLICATION: The Florida unemployment assistance applications are available for download here

For days now, Action News Jax has been hearing from viewers about glitches online at FloridaJobs.org and how it keeps crashing when you’re halfway through your application.

Sen. Audrey Gibson said that’s nothing new.

“When we didn’t have a pandemic and people were having issues with the unemployment system then,” said Gibson.

Gibson said Ken Lawson, the DEO’s executive director, inherited a bad system that’s been having issues for at least three years.

“It’s just bad, it’s outdated so it’s just a mess,” she said.

Why it wasn’t fixed when the issues first came up? Leaders haven’t yet answered.

But Sen. Gibson said this problem will be top of mind come next session.

“I guarantee you every senator in the Legislature will not forget this,” said Gibson.

CareerSource Northeast Florida (NEFL), the regional workforce developmentorganization, will be making available paper Reemployment Assistance (unemployment) applications:


On Monday, Gov. Ron DeSantis also announced additional measures taken to improve the state’s reemployment efforts:

  • The Florida Department of Economic Opportunity installed 72 new servers. The system can now handle up to 120,000 simultaneous connections by individuals filing claims. This allows for far greater capacity than the 20,000 connections the system was having difficulty with one week ago.
  • DEO hired a call center, streamlined the training process and trained more than 200 people so that they can start answering calls Monday.
  • DEO will continue to train more than 700 more individuals throughout the week, so that by next week more than 1,000 individuals will be answering calls for Reemployment Assistance.
  • The state’s Department of Management Services and Department of Revenue also have employees stepping in to help assist with the volume of applications.

© 2020 Cox Media Group

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