Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
Probe: State’s unemployment system not built, tested properly
The company behind Florida’s faulty unemployment website didn’t properly design or test it, a state investigation has found, which left it “poorly positioned to handle the unprecedented claims volume” caused by the coronavirus pandemic.
In a preliminary report released Thursday, Florida Chief Inspector General Melinda Miguel said despite a contract with the state requiring the site to be able to handle 200,000 users at once, Deloitte Consulting only tested it to handle as many as 4,200.
She also said that problems with the website persist, citing a 2015 audit of the system that identified 31 issues, over half of which had not been fixed when another audit was conducted in 2019. Miguel said another audit completed this year found 14 issues that have still not been addressed.
“The state was promised a fully functional system that had been implemented in other states, but instead got a system that was under development,” Doug Darling, the executive director of the
Department of Economic Opportunity at the time, said in an interview with state investigators.
The report, which will be made final after the vendors respond to it, said state officials failed to properly monitor the project and recommended that future contracts receive greater scrutiny.
“The report tells us what we already know, which is that not only was Deloitte not able to meet the obligations of their contract but state government didn’t care enough to hold them to it,” said state Rep. Carlos Guillermo Smith, D-Orlando.
He added, “it wasn’t the surge in employment claims that broke the site, it was any increase in claims whatsoever.”
The result was disastrous: Millions of Floridians locked out of the website and unable to submit applications for unemployment benefits during the worst
economic downturn in recent history. Some residents waited weeks or months to receive benefits, spending as much time trying to navigate CONNECT. Many resorted to submitting claims in the middle of the night.
In April, CONNECT buckled under the pressure having only managed to process 4% of the
850,000 claims that had been submitted. DEO took the website down and the state agreed to accept paper applications.
The state spent $39 million to add 100 new servers, bring on more call centers, launch a mobilefriendly version of the site and develop a “virtual waiting room” to control how many people accessed
CONNECT at once. More than 2,000 employees were transferred from other agencies to help process applications.
But Deloitte has maintained that it met its contractual obligations for the site, which went online in 2013.
“We built the CONNECT system to comply with Florida’s specific requirements and the state accepted the system,” a spokesperson told media outlets in May.
In response to a potential class-action lawsuit filed on behalf of Floridians unable to access benefits, Deloitte said it has had “no connection” to the system in more than five years.
The investigation, ordered by Gov. Ron DeSantis in May but under wraps since then, also found that the state had paid much more than the $68 million initially budgeted for the project. In all, the state paid over $81 million, including $46 million to Deloitte.
In total, the state received 6.4 million claims from more than 3 million people, more than the previous eight years combined. According to documents obtained by state investigators, Florida mandated that CONNECT be able to withstand 3.6 million claims and 1.5 million applicants per year, and Deloitte assured it had conducted “extensive load/ stress and performance testing to meet this requirement.”
Miguel in her report said the system was “never fully tested nor documented.”
DeSantis has previously said the system was broken and had been built to fail, comparing it to a “jalopy in the Daytona 500.”
Earlier this week, DEO’s new executive director, formerRepublicanlegislator Dane Eagle, told senators it would cost $73 million to fix the system and could cost as much as $244 million over the next five years, including website maintenance and to sustain the upgrades implemented mid-pandemic.
Florida’s crumbling unemployment system caught national attention, including from U.S. Sens.
Chuck Schumer, D-New York, and Ron Wyden, D-Oregon, who blamed inaction from DeSantis and former Gov. Rick Scott that left DEO “completely unprepared.” They called for a federal probe.
But Florida’s unemployment woes go far beyond a faulty website, said state Rep. Anna Eskamani, D-Orlando. According to the most recent data from the federal Department of Labor, only 11% of unemployed Floridians are receiving unemployment insurance and about half of those who qualify exhaust their benefits before they’re able to find a job. The most someone can collect is $275 per week.
Eskamani urged the Legislature to immediately increase benefits and expand eligibility.
“Floridians have suffered too much for us to point fingers and do nothing,” Eskamani said.