Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:02):
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.
Speaker 2 (00:19):
How are you.
Speaker 1 (00:20):
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.
Speaker 2 (00:40):
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
(01:02):
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.
(01:24):
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.
Speaker 1 (01:36):
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.
Speaker 2 (01:51):
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thirty five years old, so we're using an outdated technology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
(02:12):
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
(02:34):
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,
(02:55):
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
(03:18):
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.
(03:44):
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.
Speaker 1 (04:01):
Thirty minutes, my goodness.
Speaker 2 (04:03):
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
(04:25):
the more kind of forward looking direction.
Speaker 1 (04:27):
And my goodness sakes, just think of all the frustration
you're saving on all ends of that. That is amazing.
Speaker 2 (04:33):
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
(04:55):
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
(05:16):
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.
Speaker 1 (05:37):
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.
Speaker 2 (05:53):
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
(06:14):
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
(06:36):
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
(06:58):
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
(07:21):
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.
Speaker 1 (07:41):
My goodness sakes in the bottom line is is that
everybody wins on this one.
Speaker 2 (07:47):
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.
Speaker 1 (08:05):
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?
Speaker 2 (08:17):
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,
(08:40):
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,
(09:02):
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
(09:23):
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
(09:44):
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
(10:05):
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
(10:27):
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.
(10:48):
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
(11:09):
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.
Speaker 1 (11:18):
Very good. Hey Trey, where can folks should find out
more about your agency? Imagine you have a website.
Speaker 2 (11:26):
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
(11:48):
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,
(12:11):
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.
(12:32):
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.
Speaker 1 (12:42):
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.
Speaker 2 (12:56):
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
(13:17):
have questions, you can reach out to us. Happy to
happy to be on with you and thanks for having
me all.
Speaker 1 (13:22):
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.
Speaker 2 (13:37):
Is it time to start thinking about a new car,
but the thought of dealing with the large dealerships is
just too
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.
Speaker 2 (00:19):
How are you.
Speaker 1 (00:20):
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.
Speaker 2 (00:40):
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
(01:02):
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.
(01:24):
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.
Speaker 1 (01:36):
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.
Speaker 2 (01:51):
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
(02:12):
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
(02:34):
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,
(02:55):
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
(03:18):
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.
(03:44):
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.
Speaker 1 (04:01):
Thirty minutes, my goodness.
Speaker 2 (04:03):
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
(04:25):
the more kind of forward looking direction.
Speaker 1 (04:27):
And my goodness sakes, just think of all the frustration
you're saving on all ends of that. That is amazing.
Speaker 2 (04:33):
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
(04:55):
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
(05:16):
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.
Speaker 1 (05:37):
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.
Speaker 2 (05:53):
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
(06:14):
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
(06:36):
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
(06:58):
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
(07:21):
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.
Speaker 1 (07:41):
My goodness sakes in the bottom line is is that
everybody wins on this one.
Speaker 2 (07:47):
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.
Speaker 1 (08:05):
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?
Speaker 2 (08:17):
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,
(08:40):
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,
(09:02):
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
(09:23):
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
(09:44):
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
(10:05):
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
(10:27):
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.
(10:48):
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
(11:09):
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.
Speaker 1 (11:18):
Very good. Hey Trey, where can folks should find out
more about your agency? Imagine you have a website.
Speaker 2 (11:26):
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
(11:48):
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,
(12:11):
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.
(12:32):
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.
Speaker 1 (12:42):
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.
Speaker 2 (12:56):
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
(13:17):
have questions, you can reach out to us. Happy to
happy to be on with you and thanks for having
me all.
Speaker 1 (13:22):
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.
Speaker 2 (13:37):
Is it time to start thinking about a new car,
but the thought of dealing with the large dealerships is
just too
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