SEMINOLE, Fla. — As U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin announced Tuesday evening that the new round of $600 stimulus checks were officially heading into the pipeline, residents around the Tampa Bay region and beyond breathed a small sigh of relief.

It isn’t the $2,000 everyone hoped for, as Senate Republicans blocked a vote on that measure on Tuesday. It is still, however, a much-needed boost for many families and individuals in need.

Callie Osteen of Seminole and her family could certainly use the money. Like many Americans, she lost her job not long after the pandemic hit, and like many Floridians, was forced to turn to the state’s notoriously fallible unemployment benefits system. Her story took an even worse turn when, in early August, she went to the site to request her biweekly benefits, and the Florida Department of Economic Opportunity told her the request was invalid, because she’d started working again.

Only she hadn’t.

“[They said] this is a fraudulent request, we see that you’ve returned to work,” she says.

While her husband had managed to retain work, the 31-year-old Osteen also had a four-year-old at home, and their budget required two incomes; that far into the pandemic, things were getting really rough financially for the young family.

She requested to know who it was she was supposed to be working for; it turned out to be a small business in Edgewater—a nearly three-hour trip across the entire width of the state. Osteen contacted the business owner, and together they figured out that the business’s payroll processing company, Paychex, had inadvertently gotten an employee’s Social Security number wrong by one digit, thereby turning it into Osteen’s.

She pulled together all the necessary data and sent it to the DOE, which she claims said they would hand over to their adjudication department. The adjudication department would rectify the situation in four to six weeks, and she was entitled to the unemployment benefits she hadn’t been paid. 

Then months went by, and nothing happened.

“I still have not seen anything,” she says.

Osteen logs on to the DOE unemployment website regularly, sometimes spending between three and four hours trying to get in touch with a human being. According to her, every interaction she’s had with the DOE was initiated on her end. She was told that it was being processed, that whomever she spoke with wasn’t affiliated with the adjudication department, that the adjudication department didn’t even have a dedicated phone number.

“I’m still waiting,” she says. “And it wasn’t even my fault, so I thought it was something that could be easily fixed.”

Most recently, Osteen says she received a letter informing her that her request had been denied, and she would not be compensated. She was given an opportunity to appeal that denial, which she did, setting off another round of waiting.

“It’s been very depressing, it’s gotten way out of hand,” she says. “It’s just ridiculous.”

Fortunately, she’s found another job, but her family is still struggling. She may or may not ever receive the unemployment benefits to which she feels she is entitled, and the idea of receiving a $600 stimulus check is small comfort, but a comfort nonetheless, and will help alleviate some of the financial burden.

“I will definitely be spending my stimulus check on bills,” she says.

She’s not alone. In an informal Twitter poll of Spectrum Bay News 9’s followers on the subject of what they planned to do with their stimulus money, paying past due bills and chipping away at debt were overwhelmingly the most common answers. The second most common concerned long overdue home repairs that residents just haven’t been able to afford to do during the pandemic.

The Florida Department of Economic Opportunity did not respond to a request for comment for this story.