TAMPA, Fla (WFLA) – The Florida Department of Economic Opportunity has received more than 1 million unemployment applications, the department announced Sunday.
The latest numbers from the DEO show there have been 1,025,657 unemployment claims. The state has paid 452,526 of those claims, according to the Department of Economic Opportunity.
Residents from the 10 Tampa Bay area counties – Citrus, Hardee, Hernando, Highland, Hillsborough, Manatee, Pasco, Pinellas, Polk and Sarasota – account for more than 101,320, or 9.8 percent of the total applications.
Of the applications that have been submitted, 38 percent have been denied.
Nearly 30,000 unemployment claims have come out of Hillsborough County, making it the fifth in the state for the number of unemployment applications, followed by Pinellas.
In Hillsborough County alone, the applications include more than 6,400 people from the foodservice and accommodation industries.
Prior to reopening the state for business on Monday, Gov. Ron DeSantis called for an investigation into the state’s unemployment system, which has been plagued with problems since Florida’s economy began to suffer from coronavirus related problems.
“It’s been very difficult, we’ve worked extremely hard on fixing a very broken system that you had with unemployment,” Gov. DeSantis said Friday during a news conference in Jacksonville. “We’re starting to get good results that I’m happy – we need to do more but we’re much better than we were a month ago.”
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