"It almost reads like, you know, like a renew of a messy breakup."
During one of the final meetings before deciding which company to choose for a potential $135 million state contract, Florida’s assistant deputy secretary for Medicaid asked her colleagues for a show of hands.
Who wanted to ask one of the finalists, Deloitte Consulting, about the company’s previous job building CONNECT, the state’s online unemployment system?
By the time of the July 10 meeting, CONNECT had already earned weeks of national scorn for being unable to handle a record number of pandemic-related jobless claims, which left millions of Floridians without benefits. It got so bad, Gov. Ron DeSantis ordered an investigation into what went wrong.
“Everything needs to be looked at, 100 percent,” DeSantis said during a May news conference.
And yet, two months later, no one on the state’s selection committee raised their hands when asked if they wanted to know more about Deloitte’s work on the failing system.
Read more at the Tampa Bay Times