SALEM — The Oregon Employment Department missed its goal for the third straight week in processing thousands of unpaid benefits claims for self-employed workers who are out of a job during the pandemic.

And the beleaguered department’s phone lines suffered fresh outages Tuesday, July 21, and Wednesday, July 22, making it impossible for callers to reach the state to resolve problems with their claims.

Still, there are signs of progress that suggest Oregon is beginning to get a handle on the huge volume of unpaid jobless claims that left tens of thousands of unemployed workers going without income through the heart of the pandemic.

The department has now paid $3.2 billion in benefits since Oregon began its shutdown in March.

This time last month, there were 70,000 self-employed workers waiting for aid under the Pandemic Unemployment Assistance program that Congress established in March.

The department has whittled that backlog down to 44,000 unprocessed claims, moving more slowly than anticipated. The trajectory for clearing those claims is accelerating, though, and interim Director David Gerstenfeld said he is “increasingly optimistic” of working through those 70,000 claims by the Aug. 8 target date he set in June.

“We’re turning the corner,” Gerstenfeld said.

The department has been aided in part by a $240,000, Google-based technology upgrade implemented to automate some parts of the claims processing for self-employed workers.

In at least a few cases, the new system appears to have interrupted benefits payments people had been receiving. But Gerstenfeld said it’s been a huge net positive overall, with automation freeing up his staff to begin working unprocessed claims and accelerate payments.

As Oregon makes advances in other areas, though, the employment department is encountering new problems.

Processed claims aren’t always paid, though. Some need an additional review called “adjudication.” Gerstenfeld said the typical waiting period for adjudicated claims has grown from 10 weeks to as many as 14 weeks — meaning many people with legitimate claims must wait months to see their benefits.

Every Oregon claim is still subject to a one-week period when benefits aren’t paid, even though Congress funded a waiver of the so-called “waiting week” in March.

The state’s antiquated computers haven’t been able to accommodate the change.

The employment department says it will begin attempting to address the waiting week issue in August, but has cautioned it may not be able to implement the waiver by a federal deadline at the end of the year. That would leave hundreds of millions of dollars in federal benefits for Oregonians permanently unpaid, unless the state can secure additional latitude from the feds.

This article was originally published by The Oregonian/OregonLive, one of more than a dozen news organizations throughout the state sharing their coverage of the novel coronavirus outbreak to help inform Oregonians about this evolving heath issue.