After months of red tape, why can’t Missouri veterans get their unemployment benefits?
We train and equip our armed forces in the event the nation goes into combat with foreign enemies. Those men and women who volunteer for the job shouldn’t also have to fight their own government, and certainly not for the benefits they have coming to them.
Yet Missouri Air National Guard veteran Heather Henriksen has been engaged in a battle just to receive life-sustaining unemployment insurance since the coronavirus pandemic ended her post-military career at a commercial airline in March.
How many other veterans have been put in the same needless financial pinch for no good reason?
Henriksen, an aerospace ground equipment mechanic, was medically discharged from the Air National Guard. But since she was let go by the struggling airline industry upon the advent of COVID-19, Missouri unemployment officials — at least when she could reach them after weeks of trying — informed her that the Department of Defense hadn’t responded to the state’s straightforward wage verification form. Her Guard pay was a mix of state and federal.
Why not just use a W-2? Missouri officials say they’re “working on that,” Henriksen says. Well, at least someone is working.
Henriksen found community and commiseration in a Facebook group of people facing Missouri unemployment problems. There are at least three such Facebook groups, all of which boast more than 1,000 members.
“Hundreds of people are having the same issues, and the common denominator was previous government and military workers,” she told The Star. “I spoke with one lady who has children and no safety net on the verge of losing everything and who has lived with that fear since the beginning of May. I’m so thankful that the Facebook group was created where we can all network and assist each other. Some people still haven’t been able to get through to the Department of Labor on the phone.”
Veterans shouldn’t have to rely on social media for solace. Where’s the government she and so many others have worked for?
“This is the first we’re hearing of this issue, but we will raise the matter in our discussions with DOD leadership this week,” a spokesperson for the Kansas City-based Veterans of Foreign Wars said in a statement.
Elected officials have been minimally better. After weeks of no or perfunctory responses to Henriksen’s pleas for help, and an inquiry Tuesday by The Star, the office of Sen. Josh Hawley, a Republican from Missouri, called her Tuesday to get the wheels of solution spinning.
“We have immediately opened a case file with Heather and are looking into the matter,” Hawley spokesperson Kelli Ford wrote The Star Wednesday. “And if this is happening to other veterans, it needs to be addressed and corrected.”
An official at the Defense Finance and Accounting Service of the Department of Defense said he, too, would look into it.
The COVID-19 crisis has exposed the disgraceful condition of unemployment departments in Missouri and Kansas for workers of all stripes, certainly. Once the systems have their equilibrium, such that it is, they will warrant a top-to-bottom overhaul. In the short term, however, there are far too many of us going without, and unnecessarily so, due to bureaucratic sloth and deficiency.
The question is, how many other veterans and federal workers in Missouri and around the country are in Henriksen’s situation, in which the bewildering lack of verification of employment and income by the federal government — or perhaps a lack of agility by the state government — is denying deserving recipients the benefits they’ve earned?
This story was originally published June 18, 2020 at 5:00 AM.