Good moaning, good morning, good morning, and welcome, welcome, welcome. It is time now for our community connection right here on KAY one, the one you trusted on the telephone with me. Here we have Trey ray Hills with this and he is from the Oklahoma Employment Security Commission. Howy you doing, Trey, I'm doing well.
How are you.
Welcome to the show. Well, we've got a big lineup of things going on here with this here and we get at the Oklahoma Employment Security Commission. First of all, tell us a little bit about what the commission is and what it does, and then we're going to get into some pretty good sized headlines here.
Sure. Sure. We are the state's employment agency, so we do employment services, re employment services, unemployment services across the state. We are a state agency and so we are here for everyone in the state veteran services through our agency where we're primarily with all the populations we serve, trying
to help people match two jobs. So whether someone has a job and they're looking to change careers or upstill into something better for their family, or they're unemployed, or they're just entering a job market for the first time. Our primary role with the agency is to try and mask people to work and support them with on point of mefits in their in between phases while they're on their way to work.
Well, Trey, I understand you've been busy with a new system for claims. How does this work? I mean, this had to be a big undergoing. Whenever somebody says we've got a new system and the word migration comes in, oh, folks getting yeah.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, the agency has historically operated on pretty old systems. Some of our technology is, you know, thirty five years old, so we're using an outdated technology for the most part, and a lot of government is
this way. But essentially wanting to have systems that serve us in today's customer service kind of expectation and also being able to process flow and keep data on kind of how well are we serving folks, it requires that the systems modernized a little bit further for us to be able to see some of those insights that we'd
like to speak. So we've been hard at work the last few years just prioritizing which of these legacy systems, you know, is impacting people the most, and so we've prioritized replacing them and so that you know, in the future, we'll have some of this address, hopefully a lot of it addressed, and they've lost to serve people a lot better.
So the one that we just launched earlier this year or earlier this month rather is our new claimant Pital and it's actually the largest technology release in agency history, so we're really really proud of it. It replaced the system that does all of the claims processing work for
the agency and claims filing work for the agency. So when someone comes into one of our offices or goes online, historically they've gone through a process of filing claims, and there's a lot of work inside the agency that happens to support that process and just the side that faces customers. Typically it takes a staff number of ours sitting down with someone who's going to need better assistance and they're going to go through a process for about an hour
and a half. This new tool enables our staff to sit there with someone and get it done as quickly as twenty minutes, maybe.
Thirty minutes, my goodness.
So it's a huge time savings for us and for the people we serve, and then they have less fatigue and frustration and a little bit more time to spend if we wanted to do the work searches and get a more focus on kind of the workforce side of that interaction. So we're super excited because it saves us a lot of time and create opportunity for us to spend energy for us and the people we serve in the more kind of forward looking direction.
And my goodness sakes, just think of all the frustration you're saving on all ends of that. That is amazing.
Sure you sure, yeah, you're super happy about that. And it's also layered with it's got some AI functionality in it, so as somebody is answering a question, the subsequent questions will adapt to that answer and make sure that they're not rehashing or asking things duplicatively. So it's it's a little smarter in the way that interacts with folks, and that helps us to get better and more accurate data
have to sift through so much junk. It's also layered with our fraud detection and prevention tool, so it certainly helps us steward our tax dollars better by making sure that if any benefits are going out, they're going into the right hand. And the tool that is Layered in there is the Verify Okay tool that we have as well as our staff process that kind of backs up our fraud tool, but that is the number one fraud tool and process in the country, So that's built into
this new Claimate portal. So we have a lot of confidence in it and it's been going great so far.
We're talking with Trey ray Hill and he is with the Oklahoma Employment to Security Commission and Trey, you were talking about the designs within your agency, but there's a lot of redesigning going along statewide too in order to get us perhaps into the new century.
Sure, yeah, it's it's a big project, but luckily we've got a lot of partners in this work. Several organizations that serve people across the data are similarly missioned at the end of the day to create positive workforce outcomes, and that is what we need for businesses in our
economy to thrive. So if a business is looking to hire folks, we want to try our best to ensure that there's a pipeline of people that are a match to that skill set, to that talent, and that people know where to get them and that it's easy and then it works well, so whether we're trying to attract new businesses to invest in No Cloma, or we're trying to grow the businesses that are here, or we're just trying to help people on the individuals side and understand, I
know what I want to do, but I know no where to find it. We kind of play a case management role for both the individuals and the businesses, and so that matchmaking exercise, it's something that we do all day every day. And there's also other institutions in the state like Career Tech DRS, higher ed, local workforce boards. There's several partners that kind of work together to make sure that those things are done well. And we're redesigning the way that we all work together right now to
increase our efficiency. Some of the work today and has always been kind of to clickative in nature, and so we're rooting a lot of that out in this system redesign, and we're doing it as a group of partners. So it costs less to do this work across the state, and we're expanding services, so it should be more service for less taxpayer spend.
My goodness sakes in the bottom line is is that everybody wins on this one.
That's the goal. I mean, if everyone's not winning, then we shouldn't be doing this work. I usually will say inside agency, we're going to do it as the rightest way we can. If you can find the right answer, and George Tactellar improved service, great. If not, you know, you'all should be finding someone else to do this, because that should.
Be the goal, doing it the rightest way possible. I like that tax decrease. That boy, you caught my attention when we were talking just a couple of seconds before we went on the air. How does this filter into all of this?
So, Oklahoma's economy is pretty strong, and that means that as our as our state GDP is in a positive place, it generates a lot of tax from wages being paid out by businesses. We collect employer taxes based on their wage, based on the wages that they're paying employees, and that those taxes go into a trust fund, and the trust fund is used to pay out unemployment claims. The only revenue source into that fund is employer taxes and the only thing that the fund is used for is to
pay benefits. The operations of our agency, all the staff, all the systems, all the modernization projects. Those are all funded completely by federal grants. So there's no state dollars in our agency, and there are no employer tax dollars used to operate our agency. It's just the trust fund
for paying out claims. Since we've i think worked over the last few years to ensure that the workforce side of this work is going as swimmingly as possible, and that we're doing a little bit better job of leaning in and understanding industry needs and supporting businesses, we've seen our claims volume subside at least a little bit, and
that means our trust fund is growing well. It's good to have a trust fund that is sizeable so that if another event like the pandemic happens, it's not going to bankrupt us trying to support people across the state that they transition into new work. But we don't want to bet on needing a ridiculous amount of money in there forever and continue to grow it and grow it
and grow it every year. So one of our staff members inside the agency came forward and said, if we're going to be in a positive place and we're doing this work more efficiently moving forward, we ought to vision some kind of decrease to that revenue source, which essentially would cut employer taxes, and so we looked into it and we found a couple of ways to do that.
We basically decrease some of the factors legislatively that we use in the equation that that calculates taxes for employers, and we reduced some of those components, so now it is calculating lower taxes for every employer in the state. And we did that through a couple of things. We changed the decrease the taxable wage base, which is what every employer pays up to for each employee that they're employeeing.
And I know this is kind of confusing, but ultimately the headline is we made some changes to our calculation inside the agency that enabled us to charge less taxes to employers. Because our trust fund is in a positive position, we felt we could do that.
Very good. Hey Trey, where can folks should find out more about your agency? Imagine you have a website.
Yeah, yeah, we have Oklahoma dot gov slash workforce. We'll thank you to our website. OESC dot gov is our is our website as well, and we've got twenty seven offices across the day. We've got several outreached outreach locations where existing staff will go to a town that we don't have bricks and mortar a couple of days a
week and serve folks there. And then we have some mobile units that we can get around to if a place is hit by a disaster or there's a significant, you know, employment event, we can we can always hit the road on wheels. But yes, certainly they can call, they go online, they can come into one of our
offices and inquire about any of these things. I always say, if you're an employer, respond the notices timely that the agency sends out so that you can be an informed, interested party and that way you can get updates on what's going on. And if you do have employment needs, give our offices a shot because we have a lot of people under case management and whether they're looking for one of these tools, they're looking for a new job. Our people are cross trained out there to be able
to facilitate both. So certainly they can come see us, they can go online, they can call us. Then we're here, ready to serve.
Trey ray Hill is with the Oklahoma Employment and Security ex Commission. Thank you very much for your hard work and the hard work that your staff and agency do each and every day to make our lives a little easier. Appreciated.
Yeah, thank you. We hope that these are things that you know. Not everyone needs these things to be successful every day, but if someone does find themselves in a position and you need help with this stuff, we want to be able to help them. We're going to be able to be found quickly and help them fast, and so we're happy to do it. And if you ever have questions, you can reach out to us. Happy to happy to be on with you and thanks for having me all.
Right, Trey ray Hill, thank you very much, having yourself a great day. Folks, you have been listening to our community connection right here on Gay one, the one you trust. It's been brought to you in part by Wesley and Kitty College, Arnald Moore, Nie Camp Funeral Home and also Tall Grass Motors.
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