DeSantis opposes $110M contract
Company built flawed unemployment system
Gov. Ron DeSantis said Friday he opposes a lucrative state contract worth at least $110 million given to the same company that created the beleaguered unemployment system but he added that he can do nothing about it.
A protest has been filed over the deal, DeSantis said, presumably by one of the other bidders, but neither he nor his office would say who submitted it or why.
“If you look at the law, as governor I’m not allowed to be involved in that in any way,” DeSantis said Friday at the Hilton Orlando Bonnet Creek Resort. “There’s a good reason for that. So I’m not involved. … I just can’t go in and void it, legally. [But] I don’t like it.”
The Agency for Health Care Administration contract of at least $110 million was awarded to Deloitte Consulting LLP over four competitors to create an “enterprise data warehouse” as a central information repository for the state’s Medicaid program and other agencies. Some reports indicate the ultimate contract could be as high as $135 million.
Deloitte, which has a politically connected team of lobbyists in Tallahassee, has been the center of controversy for months because of the massive problems with the $77 million CONNECT unemployment system it unveiled in 2013.
DeSantis has compared the website to a “jalopy” and said in April that the system “was designed to be problematic.”
In May, he ordered the state’s chief inspector general to investigate the contract as a massive
surge in unemployment claims overwhelmed the system amid the coronavirus outbreak.
Deloitte scored higher than four other bidders — Accenture LLP, IBM Corp., Optum Government Solutions Inc. and CMA Consulting Services.
DeSantis said he believed Floridians want answers on the CONNECT system before any new bid to Deloitte is awarded.
“Obviously, we’re investigating the unemployment
[system],” DeSantis said. “It’s one thing to have a faulty system, but there was $77 million that was paid. So we need to look at that.”
While “it would be my preference that they not get anything,” he said of Deloitte, “at the same time, there’s a process, unfortunately, that has to play out.”
The first step would be resolving the protest in place against the contract. According to Florida law, there are three days after the posting of the successful bid in which “any party” can “challenge the terms, conditions, criteria, or specifications of the procurement
as unfair, biased, not necessary, impossible to meet, or other substantive objection.”
DeSantis also said that the Department of Economic Opportunity, which operates the CONNECT system created by Deloitte, submitted a negative recommendation of the company as part of the bidding process.
“So that information was before [them],” he said of the AHCA, “but I think what happened is [Deloitte] just dropped the price by so much that under the current law, or however they make those decisions, their hands were tied.”
A spokesman for Deloitte did not return a request for comment.
In a previous company statement, Deloitte defended its work on the Florida CONNECT website, saying it “built the CONNECT system to comply with Florida’s specific requirements and the state accepted the system.”
Democratic state Rep. Anna Eskamani, a longtime critic of CONNECT, said, “The people of Florida have suffered enough at the hands of this company.”
“As long as there is an open state investigation on
the broken unemployment system it makes no sense for Deloitte to be considered a viable competitor for any state contract, let alone one that is upwards of $110 million,” Eskamani said.
DeSantis also said he’s not going to reopen bars any time soon because he wants to wait for cases and hospitalizations to continue their downward trend.
Florida added 7,686 coronavirus cases Friday to push the statewide total to 518,075. It’s the 13th day in a row the state Department of Health reported an increase of less than 10,000 cases.
With 180 new virus fatalities reported Friday, 7,927 Florida residents are now dead. Including the 124 fatalities among nonresidents, the state’s virus death toll is 8,051.
DeSantis also said he believed the definition of “essential” and “non-essential” employees “really needs to be rethought. Because the fact of the matter is, pretty much anyone’s job is essential for them.”