Interstate Connection Network Relay

Idaho Department of Labor released the first version of Interstate Connection Network Relay (ICON Relay) in Sept. 2014 for staff to assist claimants with wages from other states, military branches, and federal government agencies. With ICON Relay, Idaho became the first and only state in the nation to interface with ICON using web services across all of ICON's web-enabled message types. Idaho was compliant a full four years before the federal government required modernized states to communicate with ICON using web services for the four real-time ICON message types.  However, Idaho began to understand why other modernized states had identified interfacing with ICON as a difficult piece of unemployment system modernization. There are complexities and limitations inherent in communicating with other states that use a mix of mainframe and modernized technology. Idaho discovered that error-prone messages originated from not only mainframe states that do not validate outgoing messages but also modernized states that still send invalid messages.