It’s actually quite easily possible by utter negligence.
As far as I can make out the system, apparently, hast not been cross-validated properly. What they should have done is prepare a validation-only set of cases that are fairly sampled and human-audited to determine whether they are fraudulent or not and then validate your model against those.
What I suspect they have done if they’ve done any sort of validation at all is prepare a validation sample of only frauds creating something that has a very low false negative rate by the simple expedient of nearly always saying “Fraud.” The 93% failure rate simply represents the percentage of fair claims or near to it.
Now, I’m not sure if this is what actually happened but it is possible and I’ve had students do it. Poor students who didn’t pay attention in class, didn’t do the homework, and ignored the required reading, true, but they do do it from time to time.
Or it could be a conspiracy hiding behind mere incompetence. Hard to tell with data science. Personally, I’d make it illegal for any predictive algorithmic system to be used for any but research purposes without the training and validation data and protocols being made public and the source code held in encrypted escrow with some agency. It sounds restrictive, but I’ll remind you that you need to submit plans before you go and build a bridge or a skyscraper. Engineering is engineering and people getting hurt is a possibility in both cases.
All you need to know about “fiscal conservatism” can be told by noting what its targets always are. The remote possibility that a drug dealer collects $150 in food stamps? Spend $1500 to prevent that! KBR billing fifty times what it used to cost the Army assigning hapless privates to kitchen patrol? No problem!
“Fiscal conservatism” is a sham pulled on innumerate voters.
There’s plenty about this story that doesn’t add up. I’ve never lived in Michigan, but in Pennsylvania, I was accused of underreporting my income once. (I don’t think they use the word fraud, at least not without solid evidence.) I was able to talk to an agent there (after a long wait on hold, if I recall.) I was able to send them a pay stub to verify my claim, and they dropped their complaint. If I wanted to appeal, I could have scheduled a face-to-face hearing, with or without a lawyer.
All of that was spelled out clearly in every letter I got about this. It’s possible Michigan just doesn’t feel like informing people of their rights, but very often a story like this gets started just because people don’t read the goddam letter.
I don’t get that mentality. If I suddenly won some form of lottery where I was not just rich, but super-rich, I think I’d want to spend it helping people-- family, friends, charities-- not actively working to make peoples’ lives miserable. Maybe that makes me weird and/or dumb somehow.
Some people who are successful, and they don’t have to be super rich to be guilty of this, believe that they alone are responsible for their success. They don’t recognize that they had help, both from other people and from circumstances, including luck. Because they believe they alone are responsible for their own success, they believe people who aren’t successful are likewise solely responsible for their own failures. The logical extension of that philosophy is that the majority of people who make use of programs like unemployment assistance, food stamps, medicaid, disability, and so on, are getting something they don’t need. It’s a short jump from there to believing a majority of people accessing these programs don’t need them at all and are committing fraud. That’s why stories about welfare queens and people taking limos to the street corner to panhandle gain so much traction. We in the United States have been told from childhood that all it takes to succeed in life is hard work. If you believe that, then people who are struggling in life just aren’t working hard enough. Why reward that? At one time in my life, I was headed towards believing that myself. Then I was unemployed for a year and a half, and had to work at Walmart for a year and a half. I worked my ass off at that job. I worked way harder than I ever did as an engineer making $70,000 a year, and I could barely keep my head above water making $8.70 an hour. And I’m single with no dependents. I’m doing much better now, but being poor for awhile definitely opened my eyes. It’s a trap that’s hard to escape from, no matter how hard you work.
Absolutely; it’s about blaming people for claiming the benefits they are entitled to. But they never prosecute employers for UIA fraud. When Snyder came in, they disbanded the task force to investigate employers for misclassifying employees as contractors to avoid payroll taxes. A lot of the fraud roboconvictions occurred because the system automatically assumes the employer is telling the truth and the employee is lying when info doesn’t match.
Midas doesn’t send you a letter. It sends a notification to an online account that you probably aren’t checking anymore because you are back in the workforce. They want you to keep checking back for notifications for years after. If you don’t, they convict you in absentia.
I’m betting that Michigan state employees did NOT code this! Outsourcing to private industry is always the Republican solution. Who wrote the specifications? Who coded it? Shouldn’t there be some recourse against these folks? (Dell? HP? Accenture?)
They are taught that way to some degree. They think that anyone who isn’t working or making a certain amount is a parasite and shouldn’t be living. I see comments on FB for some of the NPR stories that make me weep for humanity and hope that we kill ourselves off soon.
