By design or incompetence, unemployment system failed ‘countless people’ in Florida

Comedian John Oliver largely dedicated last week’s episode of his HBO show to Florida’s deeply flawed unemployment system. In it, he played a clip of now-Sen. Rick Scott bragging before a conservative audience that, when he left office, only 61,000 of Florida’s 22 million citizens were drawing on unemployment. He received scattered applause.

“Wow, that is some nervous applause,” Oliver said. “Even in that room, you can feel people thinking, ‘61,000 out of 22 million, oh that feels way too low. Is what he did terrible? Are we all terrible? Oh never mind, we’re clapping.’ ”

Oliver’s show, which quoted the Sun Sentinel’s work, was devastatingly on point. But given its half-hour format, it could only get through a few of the findings of Florida Chief Inspector General Melinda Miguel’s damning report on our failed unemployment system, which was so maddeningly difficult to navigate during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic that people in crisis simply gave up. For Scott, that meant the state saved money and the unemployment rate remained artificially low.

Until now, the chief villains of this story have been Scott, who in his first year as governor signed a series of changes that made it much harder for laid-off workers to get benefits; Deloitte, the accounting and advisory firm that designed the system, which launched in 2013; and the Florida Legislature, which failed to address the system’s many flaws revealed in audits over the years.

But Miguel’s report has brought new players to the forefront.

Deloitte is one of what are known as the Big Four in the accounting industry, along with Ernst and Young, KPMG and PricewaterhouseCoopers. According to her March 4 report, only PWC was not involved in creating Florida’s unemployment system. While Deloitte designed it, KPMG provided project management and Ernst and Young provided independent oversight.

Florida’s Department of Economic Opportunity, which oversees state unemployment services, said in its contract that the website should be tested to handle 200,000 simultaneous visits. But the audit found the provision was never enforced. It said Deloitte only stress-tested the system with 4,200 simultaneous users.

The system passed the test like an honors student in a remedial class, which seems to have been the point — not truly testing the system, but designing a test to make sure the system passed.

The report also contained new revelations about the lack of oversight by Ernst and Young, which apparently handled its duty with less care than its oversight of sealed Emmy-winner envelopes. In fact, Ernst and Young, which was paid more than $2 million “to provide an unbiased review and assessment of the project to help ensure that it is meeting its desired goals,” performed so badly that it was forced to return $500,000 to the state. Miguel’s report found that Ernst and Young’s services were “neither fully independent nor adequately rigorous.”

How was its oversight not independent? Was it in communication with Deloitte? With KPMG? With the governor’s office? The report is silent on the specifics.

Aside from the mention that it provided project management, KPMG is not further discussed in the report; of course, in the context of this report, no news is good news.

Florida spent $81 million of our money to set up this system that, whether by design or incompetence, failed what Miguel called “countless people.”

No one knows exactly how many laid-off people got busy signals or were hung up on during the early months of the pandemic, but they are more than a “countless” statistic. Each one is a human being, and as Floridians, our family, our friends and our neighbors. Each one represents a desperate man or woman who could not pay rent, who perhaps was lurching toward bankruptcy, or who had a hungry child at home.

Deloitte representatives told a Florida Senate panel March 8 that their work ended in May 2015 and neither they nor their company were responsible for any of the misery foisted upon us. The company’s representatives said at their Senate hearing that it made a system “designed to comply with Florida’s specific rules, requirements and policies.”

If that is the case, then we move from mere incompetence to what many have long suspected — that this was a system designed to fail, designed to harm, designed to ruin anyone unfortunate enough to lose a job in an economic crisis.

Incompetence is agonizing, but understandable. We are all human, and prone to human error and to failures of imagination. These can be forgiven.

But if Deloitte designed this system to the state government’s exact specifications and no one did anything to address its known failures, that is not incompetence, but sheer malice.

Editorials are the opinion of the Sun Sentinel Editorial Board and written by one of its members or a designee. The Editorial Board consists of Editorial Page Editor Rosemary O’Hara, Dan Sweeney, Steve Bousquet and Editor-in-Chief Julie Anderson.