State officials struggle to manage launch of new family leave law.

It's been a rocky start for California's new paid family leave program.

Several thousand workers across the state who applied for benefits earlier this summer faced weeks of delays before receiving checks. Others have been rejected or asked to submit additional information.

"People weren't getting payments, they weren't able to get through on the phones and claims were being sent back," said Netsy Firestein, executive director of the Labor Project for Working Families. "Meanwhile, people were counting on this money."

Firestein said the situation has eased a bit in the last couple of weeks, but it still remains challenging to apply for the leave.

Under the law, which took effect July 1, workers can take up to six weeks of paid leave in a 12-month period to care for newborn children or seriously ill relatives. The pay ranges from $50 to $728 per week and is funded through employee contributions to the state's disability insurance fund.

The program went into effect on July 1 and within weeks there were reports of delays.

At Crystal Stairs, a Los Angeles-based nonprofit provider of child care resources, three employees applied for the paid family leave program just as it started up.

"Normally, when workers apply for disability insurance, it takes one week for the state to get back to us to verify the claim," said Sydney Kamlager, spokeswoman for Crystal Stairs. "Here, for two of the three employees, it took two weeks longer than that, which delayed their checks by at least a couple of weeks."

Computer glitches

Part of the problem was a series of computer glitches and an initial staffing shortage at the state Employment Development Department, which administers the insurance benefit program. That led to a backlog of 7,000 claims out of 25,000 filed by mid-August: the average processing time stretched to five or six weeks instead of the anticipated two.

Also, some 3,000 claims had errors or omissions that caused the EDD computers to reject them, each one of those claims had to be processed by hand, with many sent back to applicants for more information.

"It was a brand new computer system that we were bringing on and it wasn't working the way we thought it should," said EDD spokeswoman Suzanne Schroeder.

The problems occurred despite there being fewer claims than anticipated. The EDD had forecast about 300,000 claims for the first year; during the first two months, Schroeder said the EDD had received 31,314 claims, which would be on track for about 188,000 for the first year.

The EDD brought in technicians to tweak the computer system in an effort to cut down on the numbers of claims the computer rejected. Also, starting in mid-August, the agency brought on 50 more claims processors, boosting the workforce to about 150. Schroeder said.

As of last week, the backlog was down to about 2,500 and the processing time down to the expected norm of two weeks, she said.

Figures on the percentage of claims being rejected were not available last week, in part because many of the claims were either still on appeal or had been sent back for additional information. Schroeder said $37 million had been paid out in benefits through the end of August.

But even as the computer and staffing problems are being fixed, there's still uncertainty over who qualifies for paid leave and the steps people have to go through to get the leave.

"The regulations are a mess, which has led to a lot of confusion," said Patricia Shiu, vice president of programs for the Employment Law Center, a Bay Area nonprofit organization. The Employment Law Center runs a hotline that has received scores of calls on the paid family leave program in the last several weeks.

For starters, the application form has several parts, requiring information and signatures from a doctor and the relative being cared for. Il can take days to get all the required signatures, which can be difficult in a medical emergency situation.

Shiu said many callers to the hotline also are confused about what constitutes a serious health condition, since the regulations don't spell that out in detail. Often, that's cleared up in the process of getting a physician to fill out the application, she said.

First week unpaid

In addition, many claimants--especially those that have not taken pregnancy or disability leave before--are unaware that the state does not pay for the first week of the leave. Employees can use paid vacation time during that period or just stick with unpaid leave. When factoring in the two-week processing time, the standard wait for the first check is three weeks after the first day of the worker's leave.

Also, some employers are taking advantage of a compromise in the law and forcing employees to take two weeks of vacation time before applying to the state for paid leave, according to Mimi Natividad, a consultant with the Employers Group, a Los Angeles-based human relations consulting firm.

Still others are surprised to learn that if they work at a company with less than 50 employees, their job may not be waiting for them when they return.

"The lack of guaranteed job reinstatement is making people think really hard about taking the leave and some are deciding against it," Shiu said. "It's not the potential loss of the job that really has these folks concerned: it's the loss of health benefits that go along with the job."

In cases where family members are facing medical emergencies, this is of secondary concern, she said. "In those situations, people take the leave anyway and worry about the fallout later," she said.

However, Shiu said several of those considering whether to take leave to care for newborn children have decided against it and have tried to make alternate arrangements.

This may be part of the reason why the total number of claims filed has fallen short of projections. Also, paid family leave advocates contend that word of the new program has not spread as far as they would like, despite a multimedia advertising campaign that the EDD mounted in June and July.

Schroeder said that 87 percent of the claims received during the first two months were for parents to bond with their newborn children. Women made up about 85 percent of the claimant pool, she said.

At Crystal Stairs, however, two of the three employees who applied were men, according to spokeswoman Kamlager. "The women had maternity leave; it's the men who didn't have many leave options before this," she said.