Ruined credit, depression and debt: What is life after COVID-19 for some Kansans?
All around her, Heather Maxey sees the signs of life returning to normal. The vaccinated are going back to work. Stores are opening up. Kids will return to school in person in the fall.
She is also certain that her life, as she knew it, is over.
Just before the pandemic hit, her Salina home cleaning business was doing well enough that she was getting ready to hire two employees. She felt, she said, like a “true success story.” But when clients became uncomfortable with having her around because of COVID-19, the business went under. Her unemployment benefit payments stopped for reasons she never understood. For three weeks, her husband Patrick, who was in remission from leukemia, spent hours at a time on the phone with the Kansas Department of Labor trying to untangle the mess.
At the end of those three weeks, she woke from a nap to find him dead in his home office. He was 57. Stress may have played a role, doctors told her.
Funeral expenses consumed what was left of her savings. Work has been hard to find while caring for her 6-year-old son, Colin. She hasn’t paid rent in months and her landlords have told her they may sell the house she’s rented for nine years. Though things are beginning to improve, Maxey is facing the threat that she could lose her home at any time.
“I don’t think I’ll ever be okay again because I’ve lost everything,” she said.
“How do you come back from this?”
Maxey, 48, is one of thousands of Kansans who find themselves trapped by the pandemic’s ruinous aftereffects — bad credit, broken marriages, grief, depression and debt among them. Even in the best of times, many were clinging to the economy by their fingertips. Now, they are COVID’s other “long haulers,” whose lingering damage is not medical but no less debilitating.
“There’s all these people out there that are starting to live again. And the businesses are all wanting their money again,” Maxey said.
“But then there’s a lot of us that, we’re in limbo. We’re not starting yet.”
In Kansas, their suffering was compounded by the Kansas Department of Labor, where the 1970s IT infrastructure buckled under the weight of record joblessness, sophisticated fraud and the administration of massive federal relief programs.
In the best of times, Heather Maxey lived month-to-month. But she was still able to make the rent and even save for a home of her own. Now, she goes day-to-day.
“There’s been something more taken from us,” she said. “The sense of security living in America, I don’t know how to ever get that back, I don’t think I ever will. But I want my son to have that.”
She remembers when things were at their worst, waiting for income and watching him go hungry.
“I would buy fruit and, I know it sounds funny but fruit is really expensive,” she said in April, sitting on a park bench and watching Colin play.
“Now I have to plan to buy the apple.”
A confusing system
Maxey isn’t sure when she’ll need to leave her home and she’s less certain where she’ll go next. She’s now receiving survivor benefits because her husband was on disability prior to his death. But after a year of missed and late payments on bills, she can’t find anyone willing to rent to her.
“I try emailing a lot of landlords and realtors and tell them my situation before they see my application,” Maxey said. “I’ve been in the same house for nine years, there’s a reason for that. And also, things are better now, I’m telling them that.”
“A lot of people are tired of giving chances right now. They need their money.”
As COVID-19 began to spread and normal life halted in March 2020, Kansas saw record numbers of unemployment claims.
By April, the jobless population soared to 187,000 — more than 12% of the labor force. State benefits were expanded and new federal programs established to fill gaps not covered by regular unemployment insurance.
But the torrent of claims and federal stimulus cash overwhelmed KDOL, where any coding changes in the computer programs had to be done by hand.
The result was a mammoth backlog and jammed phone lines, despite expanding their call center to more than 500 new employees. Gov. Kelly blamed Brownback administration budget cuts for halting early 2000s efforts to modernize the system.
According to invoices the agency received from their contractor, Accenture, KDOL spent more than $64 million trying to get a grip on the crisis.
Disarray in Washington made it worse. The agency had to pause federal payouts in January when the president was delayed in signing an extension of the program. It did not begin paying out again until mid-February.
Maxey, who was receiving federal pandemic unemployment assistance, stopped getting benefits during this period. The department sent her a letter in March asking for confirmation that she was still looking for a job before it resumed payments.
She said she tried to respond, only to learn months later that her fax with the information never went through.
KDOL said it later called her to discuss the issue but Maxey claims to have never received a voicemail. She thinks it may have come during a time when she couldn’t pay her phone bill.
She finally spoke with someone about the issue last week and was told to reapply for benefits. It’s uncertain how soon she’ll receive back pay or when she’ll begin getting paid again.
While Maxey was waiting for benefits that never came, the state paid out between $300 million and $600 million in fraudulent claims according to studies by KDOL and the non-partisan Legislative Post Auditing group. The fraud is believed to have originated with international groups that targeted unemployment systems nationwide.
KDOL says that since it installed new anti-fraud software in January, more than 500,000 bogus logins have been halted. But it also mistakenly flagged eligible claimants, stopping their payments as well.
The agency says it is working with those unfairly caught up in the anti-fraud effort. As of June 24, the Department of Labor said there were 401 people still owed back pay under the Pandemic Unemployment Assistance federal program. It’s one of several states nationwide still catching up on backlogs.
Marilyn Harp, executive director for Kansas Legal Aid, said that in more than four decades helping Kansans access social safety net programs she has never seen a system collapse so thoroughly.
“This is a unique time,” Harp said. “In 2008 lots of people were losing their jobs but the computer system wasn’t 50 years old at that point.”
Throughout the Legislative session, state lawmakers and their staffs were bombarded with calls from those who had given up on contacting KDOL directly. Many didn’t understand why they weren’t getting their paid.
Sen. Oletha Faust-Goudeau, a Wichita Democrat, said she wished the state had done a better job explaining the situation.
“It’s hard to tell people to be patient without updating them on what’s happened,” she said. “Sometimes just knowing what’s going on eases the pain because they know that you are working on it.”
In April lawmakers passed legislation intended to ensure the unemployment system gained its long needed modernization and that fraud and slow payments did not occur again.
How were we surviving?
The changes have done little for Maxey. She said the last six months have been the worst of her life.
Patrick, her late husband, handled all the family business. Without him, she’s struggled.
“He was the backbone of this family. If anything was happening, with unemployment or with anything, he took care of it,” she said.
“Doing this without him, it’s been almost impossible. I don’t know how to do anything, I don’t know how to be a mom without him.” With his death she also lost the disability checks that were her only source of income. It was months before she began receiving survivor benefits.
Maxey’s life had never been easy but in early 2020 she felt like she’d made it.
An army kid with an alcoholic mother, she was in and out of the foster system in Washington State from the time she was three years old.
Consumed by self pity, as she describes it, she fell in with a bad crowd and became addicted to drugs. After following a boyfriend to Kansas in 1991 she was arrested in 2001 and spent seven years in state prison on drug charges.
“They always tell you that when you’re a foster kid. You can do anything you want. You can do whatever you want. And you don’t believe it,” Maxey said. “Because on the other side you have people saying you’re no good.”
But about 13 years ago, while still on probation, Maxey became certain she would never use again. She was motivated in part, she said, by Patrick, who she’d met through a mutual friend and was “patient and kind and loving” but wouldn’t have been with her if she had anything to do with drugs.
“I had a home for the first time in my life,” she said. “It felt so safe and comfortable.”
Then the pandemic hit.
“COVID didn’t care. It didn’t care how hard you worked, who you were, how your background was. It took everyone down.”
Within months she lost her husband, her best friend, her business and her dog.
“How were we surviving? I don’t know,” she said. “I get up every morning and on a typical day I have to talk myself out of suicide.”
“And that’s hard because I love my son and knowing that he would be better off in the foster care system because he would have food every day is hard.”
Colin was supposed to be in online schooling through May, but Maxey said she couldn’t help him through it because she couldn’t afford reliable internet and her time was taken up looking for jobs and trying to get benefits. Her hours were spent calling KDOL and looking for work that pays enough to support her and her son — and that lets her work from home so she can continue to take care of him.
Hunting for jobs requires her to scrounge for what others scarcely think about, like internet to fill out applications and gas to get to interviews.
“There’s so many things that you just take for granted,” she said. “You have to have money to make money.”
By June she was waiting on paperwork to come through so that she could start a part time job. It wouldn’t cover everything but, she said, it’s a start.
“It’s gonna feel good to earn money again,” she said.
Maxey’s struggles and the loss of his father has taken its toll on Colin. Once an outgoing child, he has become shy, Maxey said, not speaking for long stretches and, in recent days, refusing to get out of bed.
She herself, she said, is only now regaining optimism after months of going through the motions with grief and stress mingled together.
“I’m a fighter, I have been my whole life so why would I stop now,” she said.
“I swear this on my life. They are going to pay my back pay.”
This story was originally published July 4, 2021 at 5:00 AM.
