HENRICO COUNTY, Va. -- As we move into a different phase of the pandemic, with employment now back to pre-COVID levels, you might expect the Virginia Employment Commission to have smoothed out the numerous issues that kept thousands of Virginians from getting their benefits.
But as a Henrico man named Kim Davis can attest, getting someone at the VEC to actually help remains out of reach.
“In March last year, I had been getting unemployment for about seven or eight months,” said Davis. “And March the tenth, it abruptly stopped. I called and they said, 'just keep filing,' and it was a technical issue that they were gonna get straight, so keep filing.”
The building maintenance supervisor has been trying to find out why the VEC cut off his benefits last year and then kept asking for more documents to fix what they told him was a technical issue.
“I filled all that out and I just sent it to them and they still never got back with me,” said Davis. “And that ultimately forced me to go back to work because I was on the verge of being homeless.”
But Davis says he's never caught up from the loss of more than two months of benefits. And then this year, his heart condition worsened.
“When I went back to work, I was so far behind with car notes, bills and house, that I pushed myself,” Davis said. “I had to work 10,12, sometimes 16 hours a day, about six days a week to try to get the money back to catch up and unfortunately, I had a minor heart attack in June of this year. I had a heart attack at work.”
Davis had triple bypass surgery in June. He's under a doctor's orders not to work and has a leave of absence and a return to work date in September.
As he desperately tries to recover his unpaid benefits from last year, he now needs to file for the time he's currently losing as well.
But because he has to tell the VEC he cannot work or even look for work, he can no longer get through the VEC phone system.
“Nobody’s explaining to me what happened to the money from last year, because I thought maybe if I get the money from last year, that it'll hold me until it's time to go back to work,” said Davis. “But they're not telling me anything on either issue.”
I reached out to VEC spokeswoman Joyce Fogg multiple times this week about Davis’s case.
And it was only after 6 p.m. Friday, after this story first aired that she emailed to say she had asked someone at the VEC to look into Davis’s case. But since no one has contacted him, she will ask again.
We'll continue to monitor Davis’ journey.
