Lansing wrongfully accuses tens of thousands of fraud

The Michigan state government has been embroiled in controversy, public complaints, legislative scrutiny, and lawsuits resulting from over reliance of a computer-automated system which wrongfully accused tens of thousands of Michigan residents of defrauding the Michigan Unemployment Insurance Agency of UI benefits.

While the Michigan Integrated Automated System (MiDAS) was initiated in October, 2013, it made fraud determinations as far back as 2007, according to a January 9, 2017 Detroit Free Press article written by Paul Egan. In many cases, those wrongly accused were subject to the highest fraud penalties in the nation, 400 percent, Egan stated. Other agressive collection tactics were also employed, including seizure of income tax refunds.

The total number of computer-generated auto-adjudicated determinations made by MiDAS totaled 53,633 between October 2013 and August 4, 2015, according to the Michigan website house.gov. Of those, 22,427 were reviewed by the state, which overturned 20,965 determinations. The initial determinations were made with little or no human oversight, resulting in an error rate of 93 percent.

in a December 16,2016, house.gov interview, Ninth Congressional District Michigan Representative Sander Levin (D-Royal Oak) stated the state's process was in violation of federal law.

"This high level of error rate in accusations of fraud is outrageous for any government program, especially one for unemployed workers trying to stay afloat while they find another job," Levin is quoted as saying. "Running a fully automated system that spit out fraud determinations for such a long period of time was in violation of federal law and completely reckless. In addition, the Auditor General's report makes it clear that the agency's due process requirements were severely lacking during this period."

Sanders said that while he was pleased with the state's reviewing a small subset of cases, "the state has a responsibility to look at the additional 30,000 fraud determinations made during this same time period."