When President Barack Obama signed the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act as one of his first major signings, there was money earmarked to extend and supplement unemployment benefits.

Ever since then, the Rockingham Employment Security Commission office has been fielding questions about the $25 increase in benefits.

The specific question they’ve heard most is - “Where is my check?”

“We’ve had a lot of calls,” ESC Local Office Manager Judy Carpenter said. “People are concerned, and want to know when their money will be coming to them, but until the state allocates the money, we won’t be able to disperse it.”

North Carolina ESC Public Information Officer Larry Parker said the agency is doing all it can to get the cash out there.

“We’ll probably be sending that money out in the next couple of weeks,” Parker said. “The hold up is ... we have to update our systems, and we are doing that now.”

However, that doesn’t mean people are going to miss out on these funds.

“But the good news is, it’s totally retroactive to the week that ended on Feb. 28, so people who are receiving benefits will get that check for $25,” he said. “For instance, let’s say someone is filing their last claim this week, the third week of March. In April, even though they’re no longer drawing benefits, they’ll receive that $25 for those four weeks.”

Parker said all the kinks haven’t been worked out yet, but it appears the money will be distributed through adjustment checks, which will mean you will get a check including all those $25 payments in one lump sum. After that, the money will become a part of the normal payment.

For Carpenter and the people who have been calling the ESC, it can’t come soon enough.

“Our goal is to get the money in claimant’s hands as soon as we can,” she said. “We want that money to get out and be spent back into the economy.”

When it comes to the extensions, things get a little more complicated.

There are two different groups of extensions, and each of these has tiers within it, Parker explained.

“There’s the EUC (Extended Unemployment Compensation), which is the federal extension, and there’s also EB, or extended benefits, which we adopted last year because the state had a rolling average unemployment rate above 6.5 percent for three months,” Parker said.

Apparently, the federal EUC will pay out 80 percent or 50 percent of your time, depending on which tier of eligibility someone who is out of work falls under.

This means a person who drew unemployment for 10 weeks would be eligible for either eight weeks or five weeks of extended unemployment claims beyond the 26 week maximum.

EB extends the time period by 50 percent, or five weeks for someone who filed for 10 weeks, and they would collect a total of 15 weeks of compensation.

Eligibility for these extensions hinges upon the date you filed your first unemployment insurance claim.

“Folks who are currently filing on their initial claim should automatically be rolled over into it, though,” Parker said.