DeSantis must investigate botched website’s history
TALLAHASSEE — Gov. Ron DeSantis has said it twice, so he must really mean it. He wants to get to the bottom of why Florida wasted tens of millions of dollars on an unemployment benefits system that deprives Floridians of the paltry benefits they need to pay the rent and buy food.
“There’s going to be a whole investigation that’s going to need to be done about how the state of Florida could have paid $77 million for this thing,” DeSantis said Friday in Jacksonville.
A whole investigation. I’ll believe it when I see it.
Most of the state except for South Florida will begin to slowly emerge Monday from a lockdown forced by the coronavirus. That transition sounds easy, compared to the massive rebuilding job required at the Department of Economic Opportunity, home of the troubled system that has never worked right since the day it went online seven years ago.
DeSantis, who ignored a critical 2019 audit of the system, has swapped out website managers and poured extensive resources into fixing things. The state says it is processing many more claims. But Florida passed California this week and became No. 1 in claims filed, and as public outrage persists on social media, it will overshadow the rest of the state’s pandemic response.
If and when this investigation happens, it’s obvious that the star witness should be Sen. Rick Scott, who was governor when this boondoggle spiraled out of control. (Will Scott plead the Fifth Amendment like he famously did before?)
A Florida governor investigates his predecessor, and both of them are Republicans who fantasize about living in a postTrump White House. That’s rich. And for DeSantis, it’s absolutely necessary, if he wants to get elected again.
“That system was not a good investment for Florida. It was designed,” DeSantis said, “to basically fail, I think.”
Fail it did, and Scott himself has said as much. Tampa TV station 10News-WTSP is running an old clip of Scott explaining away the system failures by saying: “My big focus is to make sure people have jobs, so they don’t have to even look” for help.
So who does the investigating? FDLE? A state attorney? The governor’s inspector general?
It should be legislators, the ones who appropriated the money, and who did so little about repeated critical audit findings. A lone voice in the wilderness was that of former Rep. Dan Raulerson, of Plant City, a member of the Joint Legislative Auditing Committee, who warned five years ago told the that the state “needs to stay on top of this.”
But the Legislature is highly selective in its outrage. When a fiscal scandal erupted at the Florida Coalition Against Domestic Violence, spurred by
House members were rightly appalled. They fired off subpoenas, held hearings and demanded answers in the session that ended in March.
The grandiose pay and benefits collected by coalition ex-president Tiffany Carr and lack of accountability for such wanton abuse of public money was shocking and could yet produce criminal charges. But the state’s broken reemployment assistance program has cost massively more money and hurts people daily all over the state.
At least one lawmaker wants to do more than investigate. Sen. Darryl Rouson, D-St. Petersburg, fired off a letter to DeSantis this week, saying that the website contractor, Deloitte Consulting, should refund the full $77 million and be blocked from getting any more state contracts.
“We didn’t get what we paid for,” Rouson said. “Taxpayer dollars were squandered.”
Rouson noted that the project manager who oversaw the system, Tom McCullion, is still around. Sources confirm that McCullion is a $155-an-hour consultant at the Agency for Health Care Administration.
AHCA said Friday that McCullion was let go when the agency hired a permanent project manager. The change came March 19, as outrage over the botched website was growing. The agency said McCullion was paid about $77,000 for his services.
When the pandemic hit, AHCA was in the midst of reviewing proposals for a massive multi-year contract for an electronic data warehouse and Deloitte is one of the bidders, Rouson noted. Could the same mistake happen twice? In the state that gave us the SunPass disaster, the answer is obvious.
Friday was May 1, the first day of a new month, a day when the rent was due for many Floridians. On a Facebook page for frustrated workers idled by the economic shutdown, Kayla Langborgh, who worked at Disney World, wrote: “Thousands of Floridians can’t pay their rent today because the DEO has screwed them over!”
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