Delaware’s Division of Paid Leave corrects an issue that affected those in the Paid Family and Medical Leave program.
Claim payments were delayed for more than a week because of an error in the system.
"So these are actually multiple weeks worth of payments in some cases. Some claims were brand new in terms of having just been approved, some had been previously approved, and we owed some back payments as well. With this payment, that is going out -that's gone out - those payments are now all up-to-date," said Delaware Division of Paid Leave director Chris Counihan.
Over the weekend, the Division of Paid Leave deployed a new code into production that repaired existing system bugs.
Benefits will be paid out on Thursday, and funds should be available to claimants as early as Friday depending on the rules of their financial institution.
Counihan explains what caused the delayed payments.
"The first time we set up benefit payments, we manually went through and verified each amount, but as time went on, and the number of benefit payments per week increased, we realized we really needed to get this automated process calculating correctly,” said Counihan. “And it just took a little time to go through the process of updating the code, testing the code, deploying it, and now sending the information off to our bank so that they can transmit the money."
Counihan notes when payments go out this week, it will be a combination of new payments and back payments from the last couple of weeks.
Paid Leave started on January 1.
