Resources for Technical Assistance

1) Unemployment Insurance Financing Technical Guide: Guidelines for the Construction and Analysis of State Unemployment Insurance Financing Structures With Accompanying Spreadsheet Model

This Technical Guide is a comprehensive work on building or evaluating an Unemployment Insurance tax structure. The purpose of this Technical Guide is to provide program analysts and policy makers a practical hands-on tool for constructing a UI tax system or correcting a financing imbalance in a state's existing tax structure, or even implementing an alternative method of experience rating. In addition, accompanying this Guide is an Excel spreadsheet model that takes the user through each of the steps, described in the Guide, of building a state tax system and also includes some tools to analyze a state's existing system.

Unemployment Insurance Financing Technical Guide
Spreadsheet Model

2) UI Program Forecasting

The Office of Unemployment Insurance is dedicated to providing technical assistance to State Workforce Agencies. Depending on availability, the Office can assist state staff with individual estimating requests or longer-term forecasts. In addition, the Office can provide a forecasting program- the UNIS-X model. This model built as an Excel software spreadsheet, and programmed to each individual state's laws, provides quarterly forecasts of State UI program variables for twelve years into the future. The model can be used for testing how various economic scenarios will affect UI variables, measuring the responsiveness of state financing systems, and measuring the impact of new state laws and proposals. If you have any questions, or would like to receive a UNIS-X model, please contact Ed Dullaghan: Dullaghan.Edward@dol.gov and/or Kevin Stapleton: Stapleton.Kevin@dol.gov.

For states that already have the UNIS-X model and would like to update the historical data to the most recent Calendar year, this program can be used to gather the data:

UNIS-X 2020 Historical Data Update Program

3) WPRS/RESEA Profiling Model Technical Assistance

Pursuant to Public Law 103-152 which was enacted by Congress in 1993, all states are required to establish a system of profiling new UI claimants to identify those most likely to exhaust their UI benefits so they could be referred to reemployment services in a timely manner. More recently, the FY 2017 appropriation provided funds for Reemployment Services and Eligibility Assessments (RESEA) targeting UI claimants identified as most likely to exhaust their UI benefits as identified by the existing Worker Profiling and Reemployment Services (WPRS) program models.

The U.S. Department of Labor, Office of Unemployment Insurance offers technical assistance to states on issues relating to WPRS modeling techniques and best practices as well as bi-annual training seminars on model building. Technical assistance is available on all aspects of worker profiling including general guidance, available techniques and model diagnostics, and full model building assistance. For information on future seminars, questions regarding available technical assistance, or to request technical assistance for a state profiling system, please contact Kevin Stapleton at Stapleton.Kevin@dol.gov, or Helen Simachew at Simachew.Helen@dol.gov.

Resources from the most recent Profiling Methods training seminar are now available online for anyone interested. This seminar was designed to provide state staff, with varying levels of statistical or technical backgrounds, a step-by-step approach to developing and evaluating a profiling model. Topics covered in the seminar included an overview of profiling, potential modeling variables, preparation and analysis of claimant data, an introduction to regression modeling, and basic model evaluation and maintenance techniques. The reference material provided to participants of this training seminar is available at the following link:

Profiling Seminar Reference Materials (2016 Seminar)

4) Training in Quantitative Analysis of State Unemployment Insurance Programs

One of the primary operational goals of the Office of Unemployment Insurance is to provide technical assistance to State Workforce Agencies. A significant effort to accomplish that mission has been providing biannual seminars on the quantitative analysis of UI programs. These seminars cover topics such as benefit cost estimation, taxation principles and experience rating, forecasting UI variables, and measuring the impacts of state law changes. The reference manual provided to participants in the most recent quantitative methods seminar is available at the following link:

Benefit Financing Seminar Manual (October 2018)

For information on future seminars, questions regarding available technical assistance, please contact Kevin Stapleton at Stapleton.Kevin@dol.gov.

5) UI Director’s Guide

The Unemployment Insurance (UI) Director’s Guide is a resource of information about the UI program that has been developed for UI Directors by the U.S. Department of Labor’s Employment and Training Administration’s office of Unemployment Insurance. The Guide outlines the principles establishing the UI program, including information about the Social Security Act and the Federal Unemployment Act- the foundations upon which states have built their UI systems. It also provides information on the requirements states must meet to be in conformity and compliance with federal law.

UI Director’s Guide: Essential Elements for the Unemployment Insurance Director