Gov. Phil Murphy touted what he felt was an improved unemployment system thanks to upgrades made since Monday, even as the state’s labor department is hounded by record-high jobless claims stemming from the COVID-19 pandemic and amid its dependence on increasingly, unreliable decades-old technology known as COBOL.

The New Jersey Department of Labor made a number of upgrades in previous days to help with the more than 576,000 jobless claims submitted in the past three weeks, Murphy said at a briefing in Trenton Tuesday afternoon.

“I believe, literally over the past 24 hours, this has gotten to a meaningfully better place,” the governor said.

Data released April 9 from the U.S. Department of Labor showed that in the week prior, a record 214,000 New Jerseyans filed for unemployment; there were 6.6 million claims nationwide.

Most of those claimants found themselves out of work because their employer was deemed “non-essential” and ordered to close, or because business has dried up as customers stay home or tighten their belts to ride out a looming recession.

The labor department said it tacked on 500 staff, equipped with computers for telecommuting, in order to process claims and provide customer service from home.

The additional $600 in weekly jobs benefits from the $2.2 trillion federal stimulus package will be distributed starting April 14. The same day, the state’s labor department was planning to post guidelines for how freelancers and independent contractors can apply for benefits.

An “updated IT programming” is allowing for quicker turnaround for applications – 60 percent of claimants, or 166,000 New Jerseyans. Representatives from the state labor department did not immediately return inquiries on the nature of those system updates.

The Murphy administration has put out a call in recent weeks for volunteers that have familiarity with the 60-year-old programming language COBOL, or “common business-oriented language,” that fell out of fashion in the 1990s and on which many parts of state government rely – including the state’s sprawling unemployment system.

“[G]iven the legacy systems we should add a page for COBOL computer skills because that’s what we’re dealing with in these legacies,” Murphy said at an April 4 press briefing in Trenton.

A Monday report from NorthJersey.com highlighted how the Murphy administration, and that of his predecessor Gov. Chris Christie were repeatedly advised to update the antiquated system and move away from COBOL.

The Murphy administration was reportedly told parts of the government were running on “severely outdated” technology, and state officials should identify and correct those “chokepoints.” That kind of dialogue was prevalent under Christie too.

In 2016, then-head of the state’s Motor Vehicle Commission Raymond Martinez appeared before lawmakers to provide an overview of the woes of the outdated computer system in a bid to improve the agency, according to NorthJersey.com.

“They don’t even teach this in schools anymore,” Martinez said, adding that the MVC’s information technology office “has to bring in people, in many cases it’s individuals who are retired and worked in mainframe environments, to make those changes.”