The California Employment Development Department is turning to lawmakers so it can provide unemployment benefits to countless numbers of people who filed claims in March and April, but have yet to receive payments. EDD said in an email, sent on July 2, it will be implementing a plan “to further expedite the resolution” of older cases by asking lawmakers to fill out a spreadsheet with information on constituents whose unemployment benefits have not been paid out. In a follow-up email Tuesday, the EDD said it began reviewing the submitted spreadsheets over the Fourth of July weekend. The agency also sent out an updated spreadsheet, which asks lawmakers to provide an applicant’s EDD customer account number, date of birth and phone number.“This information will ensure we can identify and contact your constituent as appropriate,” EDD said in the email to lawmakers.EDD saw a surge in unemployment applications in March and April due to the novel coronavirus outbreak and the resulting stay-at-home order. Since the pandemic hit California, EDD has processed more than 7 million unemployment claims, as of Tuesday.Assemblymember Jim Patterson, R-Fresno, is critical of EDD’s plan to tackle its backlog on unemployment claims, saying lawmakers are asked to provide information EDD already collected when applicants file for unemployment."Right now, we are being asked to be the staff of the EDD — collect the very information that they have already received and send that to them in spreadsheets," Patterson said. "The EDD is acting like they have to come to us to get the very information they've got stuffed somewhere in their archaic technology system.”Even with the new plan, EDD does not give an exact timeline for when they can get the impacted unemployment cases resolved. Meaning, the wait for benefits could drag on even longer."We still have questions as to what it means for them to quote, 'expedite these cases.’ Does it mean they will actually resolve them in a timely matter? We're not sure," said Assemblymember David Chiu, D-San Francisco. "The EDD likes to throw up all sorts of excuses about how it has been able to serve claims. And to its credit, there are many who have been able to get their checks. But, we think there are millions of Californians who have not received an answer, and EDD has been unwilling to tell us how many folks are out there. It’s remarkably frustrating.”This new plan is a revision of sorts, in response to an earlier proposal in June, when the EDD proposed expediting one constituent's case a week, per legislator. "Which was truly outrageous," Chiu said. "EDD was essentially asking we decide, of all our constituents, who can put food on their table, pay rent that month.""Imagine that you’ve got 900, maybe 1,000 cases, of people who are desperate. Instead of the EDD fixing those, the EDD tells us, they can only handle a few, and you’ve got to tell us which ones are the most needy," Patterson said. "Every single one of these people has a file at the EDD. They opened it up, filled it out, and nothing happened and they were denied, and now, solution is to make all of us, I guess, the outsourced offices of the EDD, to do their work."If you have filed for unemployment and have not gotten your benefits, you can contact your assemblymember or state senator. Find out who your legislators are here by entering your address. After clicking on the link to your assemblymember's or senator's website, go to the contact tab, where you can find options to reach out to the lawmaker and their staff."This whole situation has been incredibly concerning. We hear from our constituents as a last resort," Chiu said. "They don’t come to us after weeks or months of banging their heads against the bureaucratic brick wall. So for us to hear from so many, it’s a sign something is severely broken."EDD spokesperson Loree Levy said in a statement Tuesday the agency continues to triage responses to all claimants that need help through all communication channels, including those who reached out to lawmakers."We always coordinate with legislative staff in serving constituents," Levy said in the statement. "As part of our evolving partnership effort for investigating the status of some of the more complex cases they hear about that require staff analysis, we did let them know during our bi-weekly conference call on Friday, June 26, that we would be updating our process per their feedback. We had already been working with many legislative offices and their claimant referrals on a first in and first out basis, and we’ve added a process to address any claimants that may have lingering issues from March or April. We continue to revise that process with legislative staffers as we go to efficiently collect claim information for follow up."Levy said the agency has paid more than $37.5 billion in unemployment benefits over the last three and a half months."We continue to work around the clock, seven days a week, to expand our capacity for processing this unprecedented demand for unemployment benefits as quickly as possible," Levy said. "That includes hundreds of staff who worked over the Fourth of July weekend with a focus on those work queues that require manual analysis to resolve complex cases."The EDD also said it is working on enhancing its technology systems and has already hired or made offers to more than 4,000 new staff.