Tallahassee, FL– Today Governor Ron DeSantis released the preliminary findings of an Inspector General investigation of Florida’s CONNECT unemployment system. Here is Representative Anna V. Eskamani’s response:
“The Inspector General’s report on Florida’s broken unemployment system demonstrates a serious failure on all fronts and reinforces what we already knew to be true: CONNECT was set up to fail.
Deloitte’s staffing on the CONNECT Project was delayed and over extended due to implementations of software in other states while another firm, Ernst & Young, LLP, failed to deliver appropriate quality control of the project. Requirements for system capacity were never met, meaning that at the time of its development CONNECT wasn’t even meeting the required capacity of 200,000 concurrent external users and instead could only manage approximately 4,200 concurrent users. That alone is unacceptable.
But we cannot sit here as lawmakers and only blame vendors. Indeed, the Auditor General issued three operational and performance audits of the CONNECT system, between 2015 and 2019, with the 2015 report identifying 31 findings, over half of which were still unresolved as of the 2019 report.
Ultimately, this catastrophic failure of the unemployment system could have been avoided and is a result of poor management and leadership by the State of Florida with politicians and political appointees ignoring the needs of everyday people, instead focusing on their political donors and special interests.
Today Floridians are still facing issues with CONNECT, and we must be committed to delivering meaningful improvements to this vital safety net, strengthening access points to benefits while simultaneously increasing those benefits. Floridians have suffered too much for us to point fingers and do nothing — immediate action is what people deserve, expect, and need.”
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