Nancy Kaffer

Detroit Free Press Columnist

Gov. Rick Snyder might find it thoughtful to send President-elect Donald Trump a fruit basket. Some token of thanks for the antics that have dominated the news cycle, drawing attention away from the governor's massive, colossal failure unwinding here in Michigan.

The governor's latest massive, colossal failure, that is. I refer, of course, to the continued onslaught of disgraceful revelations surrounding the state's Unemployment Insurance Agency's astoundingly high rate of false fraud findings, between 2013 and 2015.

Unemployment benefits are meant to ensure that Michiganders who've found themselves out of work can make it through a rough patch. Under Snyder, the unemployment agency became something else — a byzantine, automated system that wrongly accused Michiganders of fraud, exacting steep penalties and offering little or no recourse for appeal.

Frustrated Michiganders, some of whom never received a dime in unemployment payments but have been required to repay penalties for benefits claims wrongly deemed fraudulent, have filed class actions; some, whose so-called fraud was detected before 2012, appear to be out of luck — a statute of limitations bars them from seeking legal redress.

Some 93% of fraud designations made by that system were made in error, a state audit found, meaning anywhere from 27,000 to 50,000 Michiganders were wrongly accused of fraud, forced to repay benefits to which they were legally and morally entitled, plus penalties of up to 400%, pursued through aggressive collection tactics like paycheck garnishment and seizing income tax returns. A state audit found the unemployment agency only answered 11% of the calls placed to it; the state's defense, last year, was that it only botched 50% of those calls.

►Related: 'No remedy' for unemployed falsely accused by Michigan's fraud system

►Related: Judge halts collections against Mich. jobless claimants in fraud foulup

On Wednesday, a federal court ordered the state to halt repayment collections from so-called fraudulent recipients. Two years after the system was abandoned, and after nearly a year of damning reports, a court had to tell the state to stop? And another audit has found that even as the state vigorously pursued individuals, it let businesses delinquent on unemployment fund taxes slide.

Last week, the governor and our state Legislature transferred $10 million from a fund swelled with penalties paid by wrongly accused Michiganders to plug holes in the state's general fund budget.

It's a breathtaking litany of injustice, and it's as neat an object lesson in the wrongheadedness of applying business principles to government's work as the Flint water crisis.

In private industry, profit is king. The wisdom of that philosophy is a debate for another day, but government, by nature, must not focus on a bottom line.

►Related: Snyder shifts $10M from unemployment fund to help balance budget

►Related: State taps unemployment insurance fund to balance books

The very functions we entrust our government with — educating our children, ensuring our air and water are clean, our infrastructure is reliable, our safety is ensured, providing a social safety net for when our fortunes falter — lack anything like a traditional bottom line. Government's objective is the public good. This includes wise stewardship of public dollars, but always, always with the guiding principle that public health and welfare is paramount. It's an equation that balances in outcomes, never in cost.

That is what Snyder, and the like-minded Republicans who backed his agenda — eager to dismantle other components of the social safety net — have lost sight of.

When the governor took office in 2011, the unemployment system was a mess. Unequal to the demand for benefits caused by the Great Recession, the fund was near insolvency, kept afloat by a then-$4-billion influx from the federal government. In exchange, the feds required states to adopt best practices for unemployment benefits administration; cracking down on fraudulent claims was part of the deal.

It was an unobjectionable goal: Folks who aren't entitled to benefits shouldn't get them. And if that's how the system had worked, Snyder wouldn't owe Trump that fruit basket.

Instead, the Snyder administration spent $47 million on a new, automated system. Fraud detection soared. And the account that collected repayment of fraudulently paid benefits and penalties grew from $3.1 million in 2011 to $160 million by last October.

Ten years ago, I lost my job. I applied for, and got, unemployment benefits. And thanks to that relatively modest check, I was able to make it through the three months it took to find a new job, with only moderate disruption to my life. I could pay my rent and my bills. I could afford to eat.

If it hadn't been for those unemployment benefits, I don't know what I would have done.

That's one of the things our social safety net is meant to do: ensure that unexpected hard times need not be disastrous. That if you hit a rough patch, you can make it out the other side.

Why doesn't Lansing see that?