The state Labor Department on Jan. 19 sent out two weeks’ worth of federal unemployment relief to 533,000 New Jerseyans totaling up to $600 per person after benefits were delayed one week due to technical problems.

Payments will show up in bank accounts or debit cards as soon as Jan. 19, according to the New Jersey Department of Labor and Workforce Development.

Under the federal COVID-19 relief package signed on Dec. 27, supplemental payments of $300 will automatically be sent to anyone receiving unemployment between Jan. 2 and March 13, down from the original $600 that expired in July.

State labor officials said last week in a statement that an “unforeseen complication delayed running the new Federal Pandemic Unemployment Compensation (FPUC) program last week as planned.”

“We also have to keep the programming for the previous FPUC payments of $600 in place, and this complication has caused a slight delay in processing,” Angela Deli-Santi, a spokesperson for the labor department, said in an email last week.

Nearly 2 million New Jerseyans have filed for unemployment benefits since the start of March 2020, when Gov. Phil Murphy ordered business closures meant to halt the spread of the virus across the state.  New Jersey’s unemployment rate peaked at 16.3% in April, its highest in decades.

Amid surges in new daily cases and total hospitalizations, Murphy has said that he would not roll back restrictions any time soon.

Since March, the state has issued nearly $21 billion in state and federal unemployment benefits, most of which came from the weekly $600 federal relief payments.

It is not clear why those delays transpired in New Jersey, but not states such as California or New York, which have already issued hundreds of millions of dollars in new federal aid checks.

The first round of COVID-19 relief checks issued over the weekend totaled in at $296 million.

Looking ahead, President-elect Joe Biden unveiled a $1.9 trillion stimulus package with $400 of weekly unemployment relief through September.