Hassle

Everything - especially this stuff - does not have to be a nightmarish hassle.

There are something close to 10 million people on PUA. There are a bevy of reasons people can be eligible, so no situation is quite the same. The kind of pay that many 1099 workers get—a check without taxes taken out—may not count, because they may need proof of net income. We actually don’t know yet what unemployment systems will require.

It takes time (and free time, we’ve recently learned, costs about $19 an hour) to run this stuff down, especially if you didn’t need it when you went on PUA in March. More important, state offices will now be collecting millions of pieces of documentation, which they must process. If you thought application processing was slow before, wait until this clogs systems.

The thing is, the IRS has this information, employers have this information, credit bureaus or banks might have this information. The burdens could conceivably be placed elsewhere. But that never happens in our atomized country; the worker must suck up the tax on their time.