State Rep. Jackie Toledo calls for investigation into Florida’s terrible unemployment website

State Rep. Jackie Toledo is calling for an official investigation into Florida’s overloaded and barely functioning unemployment website.

In a letter sent Friday afternoon to Chairmen Jeff Brandes and Jason Fischer of the Joint Legislative Auditing Committee, Toledo called for an audit into the Department of Economic Opportunity’s unemployment claims process.

“Despite using $77 million of taxpayer dollars,” said the District 60 Republican, “the DEO website has been unprepared to handle citizen applications for the several years that it has been active, leaving Floridians without sustenance in a time of crisis.”

Earlier today, Politico reported that an advisor for Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis called the website a “shit sandwich.”

Toledo also pointed out that the state knew about glitches with the website back in 2015, arguing that “these issues should have been to better prepare our system for peak traffic.”

Earlier today, Politico reported that an advisor for Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis called the website a “shit sandwich.”

“It’s a shit sandwich, and it was designed that way by [former governor Rick Scott],” said the advisor to the publication. “It wasn’t about saving money. It was about making it harder for people to get benefits or keep benefits so that the unemployment numbers were low to give the governor something to brag about.”

This story originally appeared in Creative Loafing Tampa Bay.
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