A paraprofessional in northern Michigan who left the Michigan Education Association successfully led an effort to decertify the MEA and replace it with a local association.

Mike Williams, who works for Northwest Education Services in Traverse City as an auto repair paraprofessional, left an MEA union for support personnel in December 2022, as CapCon previously reported. His frustration with the MEA led him to spearhead an effort to establish a new union, which the state of Michigan recognized April 30.

Williams had long been dissatisfied with the MEA, which helped secure an hourly raise of only 70 cents per hour between 2007 and 2017. He left the union, rejoined at the request of colleagues, and then was part of the team that negotiated the 2021-24 contract for education support professionals in the intermediate school district. That team negotiated the contract without the help of the state MEA, he said.

The new association, representing roughly 140 employees, will be the new bargaining agent for paraprofessionals and other occupations assisting teachers. The current contract expires June 30.

Williams says he received help from several quarters, including the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, which he approached after leaving the MEA for a second time in December. Believing that the MEA did not properly represent him and his colleagues, he asked about laws and policies governing decertification.

Williams began asking state MEA officials in early December about forthcoming contract negotiations and was dissatisfied with the response. The MEA regional representative told him in one message that some members were unhappy with the emails he had sent out to them.

The lack of information, Williams told CapCon, left him wondering about the fate of workers in the bargaining unit. Would the MEA still represent them if they needed to file a grievance, he wondered. Union membership was not strong, he said, with approximately 20 employees having signed up to be members.

Williams said setting up a new union was not easy, adding that he and his colleague made a few mistakes as they navigated the intricacies of labor law. Officials at the Michigan Employment Relations Commission were helpful in answering questions, he said. Tracking down the 140 employees across multiple buildings and doing so outside of work hours was a challenge, he said. Other employees helped out by making trips to the various buildings to contact prospective members of the new association.

In a mail-in election that occurred over several weeks, 25 employees voted to leave the MEA, and 12 voted to stay.

Williams says the association he and his team created requires no union dues.

A state office charged with investigating fraud in Michigan’s unemployment insurance program had some significant failures over a recent 20-month period, according to a report by the Office of the Auditor General.

Anyone who commits unemployment insurance fraud is subject to penalties, but the audit found that at least half the time (49.4%), the Unemployment Insurance Agency undercalculated the penalties. It may have thus missed the opportunity to assess another $840 million in penalties, auditors found. Further, they said, the agency either did not assess or inaccurately assessed penalties on 84% of a sample of 25 cases of misrepresentation. Auditors said the agency had not correctly programmed its fraud detection software, which it relies on extensively. The agency plans to replace that software, dubbed MiDAS, sometime next year.

The audit looked at the investigations division of the Unemployment Insurance Agency within the Department of Labor and Economic Opportunity. Fraud comes in several forms, including claimants who impersonate someone else; agency contractors or staffers who act fraudulently; and claimants who intentionally misstate or withhold relevant information to obtain benefits.

Of the samples pulled by the auditors, investigators did not attempt to identify who submitted fraudulent claims 70% of the time, and they did not attempt to recover payment or penalties 96.7% of the time.

The state’s unemployment agency did not refer 90% of sampled fraudulent claims to law enforcement.

CapCon asked the Department of Labor and Economic Opportunity to comment on the findings. “Here’s a news release we issued at the time of the audit’s release last December,” Nick Assendelft, communications manager, said in an emailed response.

Between Jan. 1, 2020, and Dec. 8, 2022, the unemployment agency recorded 300,000 cases of fraud referral, closing 99.9% of them after a manual review by Dec. 8, 2022. It also recorded 2.1 million cases of fraud investigations, closing most of them (72.7%) by the same date, due in part to rules established in MiDAS.

As of Dec. 8, 2022, the report found, the agency “had not made (claims) payments related to nearly 80% of the approximately 800,000 open fraud investigation cases.”

The Office of the Auditor General has now completed five reports on how the unemployment agency handled claims during and after the COVID-19 pandemic. Previous audits covered the unemployment agency’s work in the following areas: establishing eligibility criteria; managing personnel; processing claims; and assessing information technology controls.