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from the flipping-a-coin-might-have-been-more-accurate dept.
A Michigan government agency wrongly accused individuals in at least 20,000 cases of fraudulently seeking unemployment payments, according to a review by the state.
The review released this week found that an automated system had erroneously accused claimants in 93% of cases – a rate that stunned even lawyers suing the state over the computer system and faulty fraud claims.
"It's literally balancing the books on the backs of Michigan's poorest and jobless," attorney David Blanchard, who is pursuing a class action in federal court on behalf of several claimants, told the Guardian on Friday.
The Michigan unemployment insurance agency (UIA) reviewed 22,427 cases in which an automated computer system determined a claimant had committed insurance fraud, after federal officials, including the Michigan congressman Sander Levin, raised concerns with the system.
When we give up human judgment in favor of software, code becomes law and programmers our unelected legislators.
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 19 2016, @05:04AM
Positivity gets a bad rep on this site. False or true, positive results are a good thing. Governments adopting new technologies is always a work in progress. This reminds me of something I read recently:
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 19 2016, @05:18AM
> Governments adopting new technologies is always a work in progress.
A 93% error rate is not a work in progress. Its a damn crime. People's lives were ruined by this. The kind of person who most needs unemployment is in the kind of person least able to fight for it and even more importantly, least able to survive not getting it. People lost their homes because of this. I would not be at all surprised if being denied unemployment was the last straw that pushed a few into suicide.
Cruelty isn't any less cruel just because an algorithm is doling it out instead of a person.
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 19 2016, @05:23AM
Yes, it's atrocious. I decided to try being positive for a while though, so bear with me as I learn how.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by fadrian on Monday December 19 2016, @06:13AM
A 93% error rate is not a work in progress. Its a damn crime. People's lives were ruined by this.
Just remember which party did this the next time you vote.
That is all.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 19 2016, @09:28AM
Both of them?
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 19 2016, @12:42PM
A 93% error rate is not a work in progress.
A 93% success rate is not acceptable for this type of software.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by purple_cobra on Monday December 19 2016, @01:12PM
93% failure rate is *worse* than chance, FFS; a coin toss would generate more reliable results. It's either deliberate or a level of incompetence I've not encountered before despite being a public sector worker[1]
People who have the misfortune to be out of work or not well enough to work are demonised here in the UK too, what with the bedroom tax[2] and disability assessors who aren't medically qualified (and no, the vast majority of nurses are not medically qualified to the point where they can diagnose so should by definition not be eligible to assess a person's capability to perform tasks). The biggest crime of this nonsensical situation is that private companies are running the disability assessments and they, of course, get bonuses for rejecting claims; this results in appeals, funnelling yet more taxpayers' money into the private sector. Benefit 'sanctions' have also been applied to large numbers of claimants for trivial and capricious reasons, resulting in severe hardship, homelessness and death. The EU's recent report on the subject was eye-opening and should be required reading for MPs and tabloid readers alike.
The newspapers should also be forced to print on the front page, covering it completely, a graph showing the UK's welfare expenditure. The big money is going on pensioners (pensions, social care, increased use of healthcare, etc); if you want to save serious money, start killing them off[3].
[1] Software created by the private sector and sold to the public sector is seemingly coded by chimps, thereby ensuring the highest level of profit. While poor communications between all concerned, especially between the end users (who aren't seen as important) and everyone else, that doesn't account for the utter torrent of shit that is public sector software, spanning poor design choices (everything using its own toolkit so nothing looks like or acts like anything else or remaps standard hotkeys), slothful applications (why the actual fuck does it take at least 5 minutes to get any application to a state where it can accept input?) and just plain brain damage (digitising patient records as images rather than text because it's cheaper) and gods alone know what else.
[2] While moving people in social housing to properties more suited to their family size is a great idea in theory, making it their responsibility is a stupid idea; if the local council, or central government, want Joe Bloggs to move to a smaller socially-funded house, the responsibility for finding that should lie with the entity making the demand, not the recipient of the demand. It also fails to account for some illnesses requiring a load of equipment to manage that illness or allow for the patient to have *some* quality of life.
[3] For the hard of thinking, this is not a serious suggestion.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 19 2016, @02:06PM
> 93% failure rate is *worse* than chance, FFS; a coin toss would generate more reliable results.
No its not. Or at least the stat on its own is not enough to say.
That's because it doesn't say anything about the total sample size, just the ones that were flagged for fraud.
So there could have been a million claims examined and only ~23,000 were flagged as fraudulent. That would still leave 977,000 not flagged for fraud.