Source: IHT

The number of people filing claims for unemployment benefits jumped last week to the highest level in five years, reflecting in large part a new government outreach effort to locate people eligible for benefits.

The Labor Department reported Thursday that the number of applications for jobless benefits soared to 448,000, an increase of 44,000 from the previous week. That was far worse than the decline of 8,000 that economists had been expecting.

However, the government attributed much of the big jump to a special outreach program to notify people that they could qualify for up to 13 weeks of additional benefits because of legislation Congress passed in June.

When people came in to apply for the extended benefits, state claims officials discovered that many of them were eligible for another round of initial claims because they had held jobs for a brief period after exhausting their original benefits.

Labor Department officials said that these special factors played a big role in pushing claims higher last week. The jump was the biggest one-week increase since claims soared by 94,000 the week of Sept. 10, 2005, following a wave of layoffs in the wake of the devastation from the Gulf Coast hurricanes that year.