SALEM — The Oregon Employment Department has set a November target to start paying hundreds of millions of dollars in jobless benefits to Oregonians, federal payments that have been delayed for months by the department’s dysfunctional computer system.

The money at issue comes from the so-called “waiting week.” Furloughed and laid-off workers typically aren’t eligible for monetary benefits in the first week they’re out of work.

Congress eliminated the waiting week in March to blunt the impact of the huge job losses that accompanied the start of the coronavirus pandemic. Oregon, though, resisted implementing the federally funded waiver, saying it would take too much time given the state’s obsolete computers.

Under pressure from the state’s congressional delegation, Gov. Kate Brown reversed course in April and ordered the department to waive the waiting week.

Four months later, though, Oregon still hasn’t implemented the waiver. The employment department says it has been overwhelmed by the unprecedented volume of new jobless claims and hasn’t had time for the thousands of hours of computer programming necessary to alter the state’s computer systems so they can make the waiting week payment.

The employment department’s computers date to the 1990s and the state says an upgrade won’t be complete until 2025, even though Oregon received more than $80 million to pay for an upgrade in 2009. The state still has nearly all that money.

Oregon says it’s not aware of any other state that has failed to waive the waiting week, which is worth at least $800 to most of the workers who lost their jobs or were furloughed from late March to July. In aggregate, that represents hundreds of millions of dollars for laid-off Oregonians.

It’s been an open question whether laid-off Oregonians would ever receive that money, because congressional documents indicate the state would forfeit the federal money to pay for the waiver if Oregon doesn’t pay it out by the end of the year.

In recent weeks, though, interim employment department Director David Gerstenfeld said he has been talking with federal authorities about allowing Oregon to make the payments in 2021 if it cannot implement the waiver by the end of the year. And in prepared remarks Wednesday, Sept. 2, Gerstenfeld told an Oregon legislative committee that Oregon is making progress on the waiver and hopes to begin making the payments in November.

Gerstenfeld testified on the second of three days of legislative hearings on the crisis at the employment department, which has struggled to pay jobless claims throughout the pandemic.

That’s partly due to the unprecedented surge of jobless claims that accompanied the coronavirus pandemic, partly due to changes in the unemployment benefits program that Congress made in March, and partly due to Oregon’s obsolete computer system.

“Technology is one big piece of the problem; it’s not the only piece,” Gerstenfeld said Sept. 1, the first day of hearings.

On Sept. 2, Gerstenfeld said every state’s jobless benefit program has had trouble with its computers during the pandemic. He said that Oregon didn’t want to move too fast to adopt a new computer system that might fail to meet the needs of the jobless benefits program.

However, years of state audits, legislative analysis and employment department reports show the department was beset by years of dysfunction that prevented it from adopting a new computer system.

The state has paid more than $4 billion in jobless benefits during the pandemic but tens of thousands of Oregonians are still waiting for their jobless benefits. Many have been waiting for months, but the employment department said complexities in various unemployment benefits program have prevented it from determining just how many haven’t been paid.At the Sept. 1 hearing, Sen. Mark Hass, D-Beaverton, said he and other lawmakers have been inundated by calls from constituents who are struggling to make ends meet during the pandemic. He said it’s “indefensible” to tell laid-off workers the state has had money to fix its benefits program since 2009 but still hasn’t done it.

“We still have a battle to fight here on the ground,” Hass said, “which I don’t think we’re winning.”

The Senate Committee on Labor and Business will hold a third day of hearings on the employment department Thursday, devoted to public testimony. It will take written comments at SLB.exhibits@oregonlegislature.gov. Alternately, people can sign up to testify by phone.