House Oversight questions rollout of Michigan Transparency Network; Benson outlines fixes, vendor credits

The Michigan House Committee on Oversight heard from Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson on the rollout and ongoing fixes for the Michigan Transparency Network, known in testimony and documents as “Mitten,” a new online portal for campaign finance and personal financial disclosures.

Benson told the committee her office inherited a 25-year-old legacy system called Mertz and described a difficult data migration of roughly 24 million records into the new platform. “The vendor's initial planning of the project did not sufficiently appreciate or measure the risk of combining all of these data sources across 25 years of ancient data,” Benson said. She said the migration and the legacy data structure — including inconsistent name spellings and fields that contained multiple pieces of information — caused the performance issues users reported at launch.

The secretary gave a cost comparison to justify replacing Mertz rather than extending its maintenance contract. She said the prior Mertz maintenance contract cost $18,000,000 over nine years (about $1,800,000 per year) and that the Mitten contract with Tyler Technologies is $9,000,000 over five years (about $1,200,000 per year). Benson said Tyler Technologies has agreed to refund the state for downtime and that the current service-level credit calculation stands at $166,000.

Committee members repeatedly pressed Benson and state staff on why the department did not keep Mertz running while debugging Mitten. Benson said the maintenance contract for Mertz had expired after the state exercised its last extension and that continuing to fund…