For the seventh week in a row, new unemployment claims have fallen, even as the total number of Coloradans who have applied for benefits since the COVID-19 pandemic hit the state exceeds half a million people.

In the week ending May 30, 12,149 people filed claims for traditional unemployment benefits, while more than 6,400 people sought compensation through the federal government’s expansion of the program to those who were self-employed, working part-time, or independent contractors. All told, 517,414 Coloradans in the past 11 weeks have been approved for some form of unemployment compensation.

Cher Haavind, deputy executive director for the Colorado Department of Labor and Employment, said that there have been 1,200 reports of employees refusing to return to work, of which 220 resulted in a denial of continued benefits.

“Most of the reasons being cited for denial of benefits include the claimant was not able to demonstrate that they were either a member of a vulnerable population, caring for a dependent or living with somebody who was a member of a vulnerable population,” she said. There were also instances where employers had demonstrated that they enacted safe workplace conditions per COVID-19 guidance.

The department has reinstituted work search requirements, and claimants must certify that they are able, available and actively looking to return to work. Haavind reported that some claimants were confused about the need to attest to those conditions in an ongoing manner to receive payment.

“Unfortunately, if they don’t continue to certify, their claim is closed because it makes our system think they have returned to work,” she explained.

Accommodation, food services and retail continued to be the industries whose workers have been hardest hit. From the $2.2 trillion CARES Act, which Congress passed in March to provide an array of economic relief measures, unemployed workers are receiving a temporary increase of $600 per week in their benefits. In Colorado, those payouts have reached $1 billion.

Excluding the federally-funded expansion of benefits, the state has paid out three-and-a-half times more in May than it did during the peak of the last decade’s recession, in May 2009. The COVID-19 Eviction Defense Project, started in March, predicts that when federal funding expires in July, there could be a wave of evictions in Colorado as incomes drop.

Jeff Fitzgerald, CDLE’s Division of Insurance director, said that the department is looking for legislation to expand the work-share program, which allows companies to reduce employees’ hours without laying them off and enables those employees to then receive partial unemployment benefits. In the most recent week of data, there were just under 3,700 ongoing claims from people participating in the work-share arrangement.

Ryan Gedney, senior economist at CDLE, announced that if payouts continue to hover around $90 million per week, the unemployment insurance trust fund would become insolvent in late July or early August. A solvency surcharge would begin in January 2021 on employers, while the state would receive zero-interest loans from the federal government to continue to pay claims. The last time the trust fund ran out of money was in the prior recession, and the surcharge from that round of borrowing ended in May 2017.

Altogether, 370,491 Coloradans, or 12% of the state’s workforce as of February, have received some kind of unemployment payment since the onset of the pandemic.