Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson sat before the Michigan House Oversight Committee for roughly an hour and a half Tuesday testifying on glitches in the portal for elected officials to file legally required financial disclosure statements.
Benson, a Democrat, acknowledged the problems while defending her department’s work.
“There are sometimes bumps in the road and things don't go as smoothly as I would have liked,” she said. “Transformational change does not happen easily. It is the harder path. But just because things are hard and difficult at first doesn’t mean we run away or sit on our hands and do nothing.”
Benson said it was tougher than expected to merge multiple systems with antiquated technology.
“What we didn’t anticipate is just how challenging it would be to migrate these 24 million data points from a 25-year-old system that in many ways existed on a floppy disk into a new modernized system,” she said.
She said the next round of updates to the Michigan Transparency Network (MITN) should be ready to launch next month. She also said the contractor has made a partial refund to the state for the period when the portal was not fully functional.
Representative Jay Deboyer (R-Clay Township), chair of the House Oversight Committee, suggested maybe the state should have stuck with the old system while the bugs were worked out.
“It does not work in a manner that’s acceptable to the users,” he said. “We can sit here as government officials all day and pat ourselves on the back in what it is that we’re doing, but the reality is when you talk to the users, madam secretary --” at this point Benson interrupted and said, “We have been talking to the users.”
“As have I and they are very unsatisfied,” replied DeBoyer.
The system is part of the state's compliance with a political transparency amendment approved by voters in 2022. The amendment also made changes to term limits for legislators.
House Republicans and Benson have had a strained relationship. They are currently in court battling over a subpoena approved by the Oversight Committee for election materials that the secretary of state says could endanger election security if released without redactions.
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