About $10.6 billion in unemployment compensation and special federal covid-19 funding has been distributed to Pennsylvania’s jobless workers since businesses deemed nonessential were shut down in mid-March, officials said Tuesday.

Of that money, $6.2 billion came through regular unemployment compensation, while $3.8 billion comprised extra $600 weekly payments funded by the federal government.

Another $600,000 in Pandemic Unemployment Assistance funds went to help independent contractors and freelance “gig” workers, state Labor & Industry Secretary Jerry Oleksiak said Tuesday.

Labor & Industry said it has received 2.3 million initial unemployment claims since coronavirus-related restrictions halted much economic activity in Pennsylvania, pushing the state’s unemployment rate to 15.6% in April from 6% the month before. As of April, the department has processed 3.86 million continued jobless claims.

Processing all the claims has been a big job, according to Oleksiak.

“We’ve logged 90,000 hours of overtime. We’ve doubled the size of the workforce. We have 1,444 people on the unemployment staff, and have made 330 new hires,” he said. “We have a pandemic system in place and can expand our workforce very quickly … if we see a surge coming.”

Countless complaints have arisen from people waiting for their unemployment compensation or attempting to reach a person by telephone.

Leo Engleka of Washington Township, a retiree who drives a school bus for Kittanning-based A.J. Myers & Sons Inc. in Franklin Regional School District, said he was able to get unemployment compensation initially after the governor shut down schools as of March 13, but he said he ran into problems at the end of March.

“I called the phone number (for filing a jobless claim), and it’s busy all the time. From there, it went downhill,” Engleka said.

His daughter was able to file for unemployment compensation through the use of her computer, but Engleka said he couldn’t get answers over the phone.

Although the state has been inundated with 400,000 emails from jobless workers inquiring about their claims, only about 100,000 of those are not duplicate contacts, so they have been able to pare the long list of emails, said Susan Dickinson, director of the Office of Unemployment Compensation Benefits Policy.

The oldest unanswered email was 49 days old, Dickinson said.

Dickinson said the large amounts of money being doled out have attracted scam artists who have stolen identity information and filed for unemployment compensation. Those who get unemployment compensation they did not seek should contact the state and return the money, Dickinson said.

“We want to assure all of our claimants … that none of the Labor and Industry system has been breached,” Oleksiak said.

While the department tries to determine whether a claim is fraudulent, the state sometimes ends up sending checks to people who did not request jobless benefits because the money must be released within a week of the claim being approved, Oleksiak said.

Oleksiak said it is a nationwide problem that is under investigation by state and national law enforcement agencies.

To reduce the possibility of a scam artist stealing an unemployment check through electronic means, the Pandemic Unemployment Assistance checks for nontraditional workers such as independent contractors and ‘gig’ workers will be sent by mail, Dickinson said.

Such workers who have been unable to file claims for back weeks they were unemployed should soon be able to access an online system that is being tested, Dickinson said. Some of those workers were able to contact the department by phone and have their claim information filed manually, Dickinson said.

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