Nevada worker claims for PUA program top 1M initial claims

Nevada’s workforce agency said Friday that the unemployment program made available last year for gig workers and independent contractors surpassed a million initial claims last week.

The state Department of Employment, Training and Rehabilitation said the Pandemic Unemployment Assistance program, which provides benefits for gig workers and the self-employed, saw 70,368 initial claims filed in the week ending Jan. 30. Since the PUA program launched in May 2020, there have been a total of 1,033,000 PUA initial claims filed.

Agency spokeswoman Rosa Mendez noted in the release that the figure could be inflated due to prevalent fraud.

“Initial applications for the PUA program continue to be highly variable due to ongoing high levels of fraudulent applications,” Mendez said in the release.

Continued claims for the PUA program also went up, with 118,708 claims through the week ending Jan. 30. It’s up 23.5 percent from the previous week’s revised total of 96,089. DETR said it is the highest number of continued claims for the PUA program since early September, and that it could be attributable to the recent $900 billion stimulus package signed into law last December, which gave additional weeks of benefits for PUA claimants.

Through the week ending Jan. 30, initial claims for the regular Unemployment Insurance program totaled 9,821, down 284 claims, from the previous week. Since March 14, 2020, more than 834,000 initial claims for UI have been filed.

Continued claims for UI totaled 80,891 claims, a decrease of 36 claims from the previous week’s total. Continued claims have seen little change over the last six weeks.

Meanwhile, Nevada’s State Extended Benefit program, which provides additional benefits to claimants who have exhausted both their regular and Pandemic Emergency Unemployment Compensation program benefits, saw 66,066 claims filed in the week, an increase of 6,285 claims from a week ago.

On Friday, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that the U.S. unemployment rate came in at 6.3 percent in January.

Nevada’s jobless rate is among the highest in the country, at 9.2 percent in December. Additionally, the labor force participation rate in the state saw a deep decline in December with a growing number of people neither working nor seeking work.

Contact Jonathan Ng at jng@reviewjournal.com. Follow @ByJonathanNg on Twitter.