Judge blasts state agency as court OKs faulty computer system lawsuit

[TexasTowelie]

A federal appeals court gave a green light Thursday to a lawsuit brought by Michigan residents falsely accused of unemployment insurance fraud and delivered a blistering assessment of the conduct of the Michigan Unemployment Insurance Agency and top state officials.

The state has acknowledged that at least 20,000 Michigan residents — and possibly as many as 40,000 — were wrongly accused of fraud between 2013 and 2015 by a $47-million state computer system that the state operated without human supervision and with an error rate as high as 93 percent.

Those wrongly accused of fraud through robo-adjudications by the Michigan Integrated Data Automated System (MiDAS) were subjected to highest-in-the-nation quadruple penalties and many were subjected to aggressive collection techniques such as wage garnishment and seizure of income tax refunds after the state in many cases wrongly said they owed tens of thousands of dollars in benefits and penalties.

Patti Jo Cahoo and several other claimants brought the proposed class-action suit in federal court in Detroit in March 2017. The Unemployment Insurance Agency itself is not a defendant, but Fast Enterprises, the Colorado-based company that sold the state the MiDAS system, is a defendant, along with other state contractors and six state officials, including former Unemployment Insurance Agency Director Sharon Moffett-Massey.

Read more: https://www.freep.com/story/news/local/michigan/2019/01/03/unemployment-insurance-agency-michigan/2474723002/

[catbyte]

1. This is yet another reason why we cleaned house in 2018. Shameful.

[guruoo]

2. The MIDAS touch nt

[bluecollar2]

3. The poor people affected.

God knows what kind of hell they have been through, are going through and will continue to go through.

Hopefully criminal charges can be brought to bear in some way.

[Farmer-Rick]

4. Yeah, 20,000 to 40,000 people's lives were ruined through no fault of their own.

And the contractors who did it, while making profit off it, claim it's the computer's fault. This is how capitalism protects criminals and the corrupt.

[Fuzzpope]

5. Republican Money Tree.

I'm not sure I agree with the error percentile, sounds like it was functioning exactly as it was intended to.

Image for a second, systems like this deployed nationwide.

Don't think for one second that ambition was never discussed at some point.

Every person attached to this, the American people need to see them in prison, lest shit like this rear it's filthy head again elsewhere, in another form.