TALLAHASSEE, Fla. — Gov. Ron DeSantis on Thursday ordered the state's unemployment agency to remove a requirement that unemployed workers would not have to go back into the beleaguered computer system to re-verify that they were still unemployed.

DeSantis had before told the Florida Department of Economic Opportunity to remove any "red tape" to the unemployment process, and said requiring people to re-certify every two weeks that they were still unemployed should have been waived sooner. The provision was required by law.

The re-verification requirement added stress to the computer system, according to state technical workers, DeSantis said. 

"If the system is suffering under too much stress, why would we want people to have to go on and recertify that? We know what the economy is doing right now," DeSantis said. 

DeSantis also said that DEO had made 121,102 payments to Floridians in re-employment assistance since March — 33,623 to individual Floridians.

The state has successfully received 800,000 to 850,000 unemployment claims so far, according to Jon Satter, who was appointed head of the state's unemployment effort Wednesday. 

Hundreds of thousands of Floridians are out of work, and for weeks many have expressed frustration to Spectrum News regarding issues with the unemployment system crashing, kicking them out of the system in the midst of applying, and not being able to get anyone on the phone at DEO to help them.   

In addition, 23,801 checks were mailed out this week. These are the $600 unemployment payments coming from the federal CARES Act. The state decided it would be faster to mail those checks out. 

Some 2,000 workers are working to transfer information from the new Pegasus unemployment system, and also from paper applications, to Florida's older CONNECT database, according to Satter.

In addition, some 2,000 people are working from home to take phone calls.