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 an aging system would not have been cost-effective. Tina Anderson, chief of staff for the Department of State, and a representative from Tyler Technologies described the phased rollout approach taken after the department identified migration risks: lobbyist filings and other modules were launched separately, with personal financial disclosure launched later in 2025.

Benson outlined a schedule of software fixes already deployed and planned releases: fixes went live May 31 and June 17, and a larger release was scheduled for July 12, with further improvements planned for August, October and into 2026. She said the July 12 release would add a campaign-filing summary report, improved public-search performance (including cumulative-contributions search and easier result scrolling and downloads), and enhancements to filer workflows such as credit-card payments for committee and lobby fees and lobby registration improvements.

On compliance with recent legislative changes: the secretary said the June 13 personal financial disclosure deadline “went smoothly” for some users. Her office reported 47 personal financial disclosures submitted through the Mitten module and 112 submitted by emailed PDF forms for that filing window. Benson and staff explained that PDFs are posted on the public page but are not yet incorporated into the system’s searchable fields — each emailed PDF must be manually entered into the module by Bureau of Elections staff for it to be fully searchable.

Lawmakers pressed procurement and vendor issues. Several members questioned whether Tyler Technologies or its acquired entities previously owned Mertz or Michigan Interactive and whether that connection should have been material to selecting a vendor. An Abby Diaz (Tyler) representative confirmed Tyler acquired Michigan Interactive (the prior operator of Mertz) in April 2021. Benson said vendor selection followed an RFP process and that the evaluation committee had vetted bidders per DTMB (Department of Technology, Management & Budget) procurement rules; she added that one of the two bidders had been found deficient on security and legal specifications and thus not eligible for award.

Committee members asked about contingency plans, testing and accountability. Tina Anderson explained the department uses regression testing on each release and will deploy “hotfixes” to address critical filing-blocking issues between scheduled releases. Benson said the department has added DTMB project management, data architecture and UI resources, and that Tyler had doubled the resources they supplied without charging the state extra. She also said contract terms include flat fees and negotiated service-level credits for availability and support thresholds; Benson said the contract leaves Tyler “on the hook” to deliver and that the state will pay only when the system meets contractual expectations.

Lawmakers raised user-impact concerns and equity of experience: several members said many filers could not complete online filings and instead submitted PDFs, and they pressed the department for plans on how to make those PDFs discoverable in the public search. Benson and staff confirmed manual entry is required to make emailed PDFs fully searchable and described ongoing efforts to process those records.

Committee members also asked about data-validation improvements intended to make searches more reliable — for example, grouping variant spellings of a name or matching committees that share treasurers or addresses. Benson said one goal of Mitten is to bring data from multiple prior systems into a single, searchable database to enable queries such as all filings tied to a treasurer or all committees at a single address — features she said were not reliably possible under Mertz.

On enforcement and outside review: members asked whether any nongovernmental organizations have privileged access to Mitten; Benson replied she was not aware of any and said she would follow up to provide a comprehensive response. The attorney general’s opinion related to Benson’s prior campaign-use determination was referenced; Benson said the AG’s opinion resolved the matter and that the department has posted the AG determination on its website.

The hearing closed after additional questions about contractor man-hours, refund amounts, and the department’s plan to reach parity or exceed Mertz functionality. Committee members and Benson agreed to continued oversight and follow-up as releases roll out and as staff process emailed PDFs into the searchable system.

The committee recorded two routine motions during the meeting: Representative Regas moved to approve the minutes of the June 3 meeting (approved by unanimous consent), and Representative Bierlein moved to excuse absent members (approved by unanimous consent).