STATEWIDE — Gov. Ron DeSantis himself is calling the state’s unemployment website a flawed system and a clunker and he wants an investigation to uncover why.

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The governor says a lot of money went into a system that just is not working. DeSantis is calling for an inspector general investigation to dig into the CONNECT system and find out why it is failing.

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DeSantis, who is always quick to point out that this CONNECT system was approved by the prior administration and not his, stressed that it has had issues since its inception.

The state paid the firm Deloitte $40 million for the CONNECT system initially but the company amended the contract 14 times. 

In the end, the state ended up shelling out $77.9 million — nearly twice what it agreed to pay initially — for the site.

Now, DeSantis is ordering the inspector general to investigate and get some answers on why it is not working.

"I hope we're going to get with the IG investigation, I hope we'll get some clarity on why the state would have spent all this money on this system when it clearly didn't have the capacity to handle. And not just this much, because this is unprecedented, any system is going to have some problems. But if we had anything other than 3 or 4 percent unemployment, this system was going to be a problem. Even a mild recession, this would have been a problem," he said.

The system has had scheduled outages to allow the state to catch up on the applications for unemployment coming in.

During the past few weeks, the state has been working to make desperate fixes to the overloaded site.

“It was pretty clear as we got into the end of March this thing just wasn’t going to cut it. So we looked into, do you just create a new website and try to do it that way? The problem with that was it would take 30 days just for the company to survey and figure out what needed to be done. We did not have just 30 days to sit around,” DeSantis said.

DeSantis says the state has engineers working on the CONNECT system to weed out bad code and find ways to streamline the system to make it easier to use so Floridians can get the money they so desperately need right now.

Secretary for the Florida Department of Management Services John Satter is helping fix this system and he says many applications coming in are missing information or have come in two or three times.

Satter says that if someone is eligible, that person will receive money from the day he or she are eligible until it runs out, stressing “no one is going to be out any money.”

He says so far the state has had more than 1 million claims submitted.