Design was poor and oversight was lax, a state audit of the CONNECT unemployment system says
An inspector general’s probe into Florida’s failed unemployment system found that the system was never prepared to handle even a modest amount of jobless claims, much less the historic number of claims that crushed it during the pandemic last year.
In the report, released by Gov. Ron DeSantis on Thursday, Chief Inspector General Melinda Miguel found that state officials provided poor oversight and never fixed longstanding problems with the online system, known as CONNECT.
The report found:
The Department of Economic Opportunity originally requested the system be able to handle 200,000 concurrent users. But Deloitte Consulting, the company that built it, only tested its system to handle 4,200 concurrent users — a drastically low number that caused the system to fail when it was rolled out in 2013, and fail again last year, when it was overwhelmed by hundreds of thousands of desperate Floridians hoping to file unemployment claims.
Despite its original guidelines, the Department of Economic Opportunity never held Deloitte to that higher 200,000 number. After the state scrambled to beef up CONNECT during the pandemic, adding 72 additional servers, it can still only handle 100,000 concurrent users — half of what was promised.
The company hired to independently evaluate CONNECT before it went live in 2013, Ernst & Young, was “neither fully independent nor adequately rigorous,” the inspector general wrote. The company was paid more than $2 million for its services but paid the state back $500,000 in 2015.
CONNECT had so many defects and problems that when it went live in 2013 it violated the state’s contract with Deloitte.
Those defects and problems with CONNECT persisted. State auditors flagged them in 2015,
2016 and 2019. Despite that clear record, neither the administrations of
Gov. Rick Scott nor DeSantis remedied the errors. Of the 31 issues that auditors flagged in 2015, 14 remain unfixed.
After investigating CONNECT, Miguel recommended state leaders adhere to basic — and obvious — oversight and governance of its information-technology projects, including:
Ensuring projects have independent reviews that are overseen by the state’s chief information officer.
Ensure agency heads resolve technical problems flagged by state auditors.
Move CONNECT’s replacement into the cloud, where it can better handle extreme workloads
The inspector general’s investigation was requested by DeSantis last year after CONNECT failed amid a crush of jobless claims triggered by the pandemic. DeSantis said at the time that he believed the system was designed to fail, although the report doesn’t appear to address that assertion.