Gov. Ron DeSantis on Monday requested Chief Inspector General Melinda Miguel investigate why the state spent $77 million for an unemployment website that collapsed “right off the bat” in mid-March when Floridians left jobless by the response to COVID-19 tried to file claims.
“It was not a good use of taxpayers’ money,” he said. “I think everything needs to looked at, 100 percent.”
Florida since has spent more than $100 million to upgrade the system and still is facing significant backlogs in processing unemployment applications.
DeSantis said he wants to know more about the contract with DeLoitte Consulting to build the CONNECT unemployment website for the Department of Economic Opportunity (DEO) in 2011 for $40 million.
Fourteen work-order changes later, he said, the site cost $77 million to launch in 2013.
Despite calls from some lawmakers and state officials to fire DeLoitte, then-Gov. Rick Scott’s administration continued with the contract.
As has been widely noted, among DeLoitte’s lobbyists at the time was Ballard Partner’s Brian Ballard, the co-chairman of Scott’s inaugural finance committee.
“There’s a lot of money that went in to this,” DeSantis said. “I think that’s something that’s very important for the people of Florida to know.”
Asked whether the state would no longer do business with DeLoitte, a global government services contractor, he said if the investigation provides reasons for doing so, “I would entertain that.”
The governor ordered the probe hours after state Agriculture Commissioner Nikki Fried asked Miguel to investigate DeSantis for “potential mismanagement” of the state’s unemployment system.
Fried said DeSantis is as culpable as Scott is in failing to act and is not doing enough now to remedy the problem.
“State auditors cited major, systematic problems with CONNECT in 2015, 2016, and 2019 reports. Gov. DeSantis was briefed on these problems upon taking office. Since then, the COVID-19 pandemic has caused unprecedented requests for unemployment assistance, but has also exposed a failure to correct the problems,” Fried wrote.
Fried said the governor has not responded “to questions about which of the 17 findings in last year’s report had been fixed” and has not “acted with the urgency or transparency that the situation necessitates.”
DeSantis said the audits “never reached my desk” but he has “read the reports since it became fodder.”
Issues cited in the audits were “different problems” than those the CONNECT system encountered in mid-March that were “obviously problems this $77 million system was not able to handle,” he said.
The state has spent at least $100 million on its unemployment system since it floundered for a month, purchasing 72 new servers, launching a mobile friendly application process and offering paper applications that FedEx, CareerSource Florida and other businesses have volunteered to print and file for free.
DeSantis has authorized the state to hire five call centers, transferred more than 2,000 state employees to DEO and appointed Department of Management Services Secretary Jon Satter to be the state’s sudden “unemployment czar.”
On April 23, DEO reported it had processed 193,405 of 679,179 “unique” claims with only about 16 percent, or 108,216, being paid.
Over the past 10 days, however, which included back-to-back weekend site shutdowns to process backlogs, DEO has processed more than 540,000 applications and paid more than 370,000 claims.
DEO reported Monday on its Reemployment Assistance Claims Dashboard that 735,740 of 1.047 million “confirmed unique” unemployment claims filed by state residents since March 15 had been processed, and 478,666 – or 45.7 percent – had been paid, totaling $979.2 million.
