Pandemic Darlings The pandemic economy, in original documents
Home Profiles Geographic Solutions

Profiles · Companies and entities

ProfileCompany or group

Geographic Solutions

Vendor or contractor

Unemployment insurance
Type
Company or group
Role
Vendor or contractor
Programs
Unemployment insurance
Updated
  • Type: Private software vendor supplying state and local governments with labor-exchange, workforce-development, and unemployment-insurance (UI) claims systems.
  • Legal entity: Geographic Solutions, Inc. (GSI).
  • Founded: 1993.
  • HQ: 2570 Coral Landings Blvd, Palm Harbor, FL 34684.
  • Key people: Paul Toomey (president), who issued the company's statements during the June 2022 outage.
  • Role: Operates the platforms many states use to run job-search, workforce, and in some states UI-claim functions, including its Virtual OneStop (VOS) labor-exchange portals and the Geographic Solutions Unemployment System (GUS), which handles UI and PUA claim filing, tax management, and appeals. GSI describes itself as the "leading vendor" of employment software and says it sells to 30-plus U.S. states and territories.

Role in pandemic relief

  • Reader shorthand: the single vendor behind many states' job-search and UI-claim portals during the pandemic recovery.
  • What GSI did for claimants: ran the online portals where claimants filed new and continued UI/PUA claims, filed appeals, and completed the mandatory work-search step that gated benefit eligibility.
  • What GSI sold to governments: the VOS labor-exchange platform, the GUS unemployment system, and related workforce products, under contracts held by state workforce agencies.
  • Who else was in the stack: GSI sold to the same state agencies as the identity- and fraud-verification vendors they used (ID.me, Socure, Thomson Reuters / Pondera, and LexisNexis Risk Solutions), but GSI ran claims and labor-exchange systems, and separate vendors ran benefit payments in some states.
  • Where responsibility sat: state workforce agencies owned the programs and eligibility rules; GSI provided and hosted the software. The accountability record here concerns availability and single-vendor concentration risk, not fraud. No GAO or inspector-general finding attributes benefit fraud to GSI.

Before the pandemic

GSI had for years supplied state and local workforce agencies with labor-exchange and case-management software, chiefly its Virtual OneStop (VOS) product line, and unemployment-system components.

Pandemic role (2020–2022)

When PUA and Pandemic Emergency Unemployment Compensation (PEUC) drove record caseloads, states running on GSI depended on it both for claim intake (via GUS) and for the labor-exchange/work-search portals claimants had to use to keep collecting.

The company's own account. In a self-published case study, GSI says that "in less than two months" it "was able to scale its infrastructure to support the needs of nine states and U.S. territories," and that over 2020 it "processed and distributed a historic $41.9 billion in unemployment compensation and thwarted $10.7 billion in fraudulent claims." Those figures are GSI's own marketing claims and are not independently verified.

A contested rollout. WHYY reported that Pennsylvania awarded GSI a no-bid contract worth more than $4 million to create and administer its PUA system, and that the site GSI built "bungled payments and failed to provide timely information about delays and rejections to claimants." That criticism is WHYY's reporting on the Pennsylvania rollout.

The June 2022 cyberattack and outage

The June 2022 outage. Beginning Sunday, June 26, 2022, and first reported in Nebraska, an apparent cyberattack on GSI took state unemployment and workforce/job-search systems offline across a large number of states and Washington, D.C. The scope was described in different terms by different agencies: California's EDD said "dozens of states"; the Louisiana Workforce Commission said the outage "could affect up to 40 states" and D.C. Named affected systems included Nebraska's NEworks, Louisiana's HiRE, Florida's Employ Florida, Tennessee's Jobs4TN, South Carolina's SC Works Online Services, Texas's WorkInTexas.com, and paid-family-leave and job-search functions in Washington state.

GSI's characterization. President Paul Toomey told states, around June 29, 2022, that the company "recently identified anomalous activity on our network, and immediately took the Jobs4TN system offline to halt the activity," and that "with the help of third-party specialists, we are conducting a full investigation to determine the cause and scope of the incident." GSI said its initial findings indicated "no personal data was accessed and no data was removed," a claim relayed to claimants through, for example, the Nebraska Department of Labor. GSI declined to confirm whether ransomware was involved; the Nebraska Department of Labor characterized the event as a "cyberattack," while GSI's own wording was "anomalous activity."

A primary state-agency record. The South Carolina Department of Employment and Workforce issued its own release on June 30, 2022 stating that GSI, "the vendor that runs the SC Works Online Services (SCWOS) portal," was experiencing a "nationwide outage caused by a cyberattack that impacts websites in multiple states." SC DEW noted its MyBenefits payment portal ran on a different vendor and was unaffected, so payments continued; the outage hit the mandatory work-search step, which DEW waived for the claim weeks ending June 25 and July 2, 2022.

Claimant impact and recovery. Payments and required work-search were delayed for claimants in multiple states: Tennessee (about 12,000 weekly UI recipients, with Jobs4TN offline), Nebraska (payments delayed), Washington (unable to file new paid-family-leave claims), and Louisiana (about 11,000 existing claimants routed to automated phone filing). States improvised: California temporarily lifted its jobs-site registration requirement and redirected users to the National Labor Exchange. Systems were restored on a rolling basis over the following week, with GSI reportedly aiming to be back before July 4.

Single-vendor concentration. The outage exposed the single-vendor concentration risk beneath state UI: one vendor's incident could freeze benefit certification and work-search across dozens of states at once. A related oversight reference is the June 2022 GAO report on Department of Labor and state UI IT systems (gao.gov).

Pandemic relief received

Geographic Solutions, Inc. of Palm Harbor took a PPP loan of its own: $5,139,611.42 from SouthState Bank, approved April 27, 2020, with 340 jobs reported. SBA recorded forgiveness of $5,195,718.84 on June 9, 2021 (SBA PPP loan-level data, loan 3660567204).

  • ID.me — identity-verification vendor used in state UI intake.
  • Socure — identity/fraud-decisioning vendor in the same public-sector market.
  • Thomson Reuters / Pondera — fraud-analytics vendor for government benefit programs.
  • LexisNexis Risk Solutions — identity and risk-data vendor used in UI verification.

Sources

Primary and state-agency documents

  • South Carolina Department of Employment and Workforce, "SC Works Online Services (SCWOS) is Down Due to a Nationwide Outage" (June 30, 2022): SC DEW notice, June 30, 2022 (original: dew.sc.gov).1
  • GSI President Paul Toomey's statement to states (~June 29, 2022), as quoted by CNN and relayed by the Nebraska Department of Labor.2

Company statements

Reporting

Notes

  1. South Carolina DEW official news release, June 30, 2022. Primary state-agency confirmation of the GSI outage as a "cyberattack" causing a "nationwide outage," and of the payment-vendor firewall. ↩
  2. CNN Politics (Sean Lyngaas), July 1, 2022. Source for GSI/Toomey's "anomalous activity" statement, the "no personal data accessed" claim relayed via Nebraska DOL, and Tennessee/Nebraska/Washington claimant impact. ↩
  3. Geographic Solutions self-published case study (retrieved 2026-07-05); the $41.9B / $10.7B / nine-states figures are GSI marketing claims, not independently verified. The Pennsylvania no-bid PUA contract and payment-bungling are WHYY's reporting. ↩
  4. StateScoop (Emily Bamforth), June 30, 2022. Source for scope ("dozens of states" per California EDD; "up to 40 states" per the Louisiana Workforce Commission) and named affected state systems. ↩
Back to top