A funding bill that will provide $115.2 million over four years to help operate the state's Office of Unemployment Compensation and pay for a technology upgrade is now law.

Gov. Tom Wolf on Wednesday signed the legislation that the General Assembly intends to be the last infusion of state dollars that is put into the system, which it believes should eventually be able to operate only on the federal dollars it receives.

The money that the state is putting into the system will be swept from the dollars that Pennsylvania workers pay into the Unemployment Compensation Trust Fund, which is used to pay for jobless benefits.

The measure is expected to pay for a minimal increase in service levels and some additional employees and $30 million for the computer modernization project.

But state Department of Labor & Industry officials, who oversee the unemployment compensation operation, have said the $85 million earmarked for operating costs spread over four years will not be enough to bring staffing levels up to where they were before about 500 positions were eliminated last December due to a legislative standoff over state funding for the system.

That standoff was temporarily resolved in April when the Legislature approved providing $15 million in funding to operate the system until a longer term funding bill was passed. That money enabled the system to rehire 200 furloughed workers to reduce the long delays jobless workers and employers were encountering when calling the unemployment compensation offices or in processing benefits.

Additionally, the department has worked to improve the office's efficiencies by revising the jobless benefit applications to reduce the number of incorrect responses and delays and cutting the number of steps involved in the processing of employer registrations from 41 to 15 and eliminating an unnecessary letter to employers.

The Wolf Administration also has a pending lawsuit filed in Dauphin County Court against IBM alleging fraud and failures related to the work it was hired to perform to modernize the unemployment compensation system's technology. The department pulled the plug on that contract in 2013 after it ran $60 million over budget and 42 months behind schedule.

The agreement to provide four additional years of state funding was the result of a compromise reached between House and Senate labor relations committees and their chairmen.

Rep. Rob Kauffman, R-Franklin County, who sponsored the funding bill, said they realized that turning off the spigot of state dollars before the department finishes its computer upgrades would create another crisis like the one unemployed people and employers encountered last winter.

Instead, lawmakers decided to provide an "exit ramp" to give the department time to figure out a way to wean itself off the state support, he said.

"They may have to make some tough decisions along the way, but plenty of other states have figured out how to make this work," Kauffman told PennLive last week. "This funding was always supposed to be temporary, and I have no intention of bailing out the department in another four years if they cannot make this work."

A handful of GOP lawmakers opposed putting any more state dollars into the system because the department couldn't fully account how it spent the $178 million that the state put into it between 2013 and 2016. That was discovered by auditors from state Auditor General Eugene DePasquale's office when they went looking into department records.

Some Democratic members, meanwhile, worry that the four-year funding bill may not be enough to adequately operate the system, noting that the department had requested $185 million. It also is less than the $160 million that DePasquale recommended in his audit report. But they advised that they will be monitoring the system and its performance going forward.

*This post was updated to correct that the money will come from only employee contributions paid into the Unemployment Compensation Trust Fund.