The Vendor Accountability Gap: What Michigan’s $9 Million Transparency Failure Reveals About Government IT

Michigan paid roughly $9 million for a transparency system that could not display lobbyist spending. Three states away, the same contractor’s court software was named in a federal suit over people held in jail too long. The through line is not the vendor. It is who has standing to do anything about it.

What Michigan Bought and What It Received

In November 2022, Michigan voters approved Proposal 1 by roughly two thirds, requiring elected officials to file annual disclosures covering income, assets, liabilities, gifts from lobbyists, and future employment agreements. Implementing that mandate required a filing system. The Department of State went to procurement and got one qualified bidder.

The contract went to Tyler Technologies, a Plano, Texas firm and one of the largest government software contractors in the country. The value was roughly $9 million over five years, with annual maintenance costs of about $1.2 million. The product was the Michigan Transparency Network, a cloud platform intended to consolidate campaign finance, lobby expense, personal financial disclosure, legal defense fund, and casino financial interest reporting into one place.

The personal financial disclosure portal launched in March 2024. What followed is documented in emails Bridge Michigan obtained through a records request. State officials described the contractor’s delays and programming errors in blunt terms, repeatedly calling them unacceptable. A December 2024 training session on the lobbying disclosure module was canceled because the product was too full of errors to demonstrate. The public launch slipped from late February, then slipped again.

By May 2025 the Legislature had intervened in the most direct way available to it. Facing a May 15 personal financial disclosure deadline and a system lawmakers could not reliably use, the House and Senate passed a law extending the deadline to June 13 and permitting officials to file by email. The state had spent millions on a filing system and then legislated its way around it.

On May 20, 2025, representatives of the Department of State, Tyler Technologies, and the Department of Technology, Management and Budget testified at a joint hearing of the House Committee on Oversight and the General Government Subcommittee. The criticism was bipartisan. The Secretary of State’s chief of staff apologized and committed the department to working nights and weekends until the system functioned. The department paused payments to the vendor. The vendor agreed to refund $166,000 in credits for downtime and failures.

Six months later, Bridge reported that payments had still not resumed. Lawmakers had written a provision into the fiscal year 2026 budget directing the Department of State to move its IT systems to DTMB. The department’s position was that the language codified practices already in place, and the arrangement did not change.

The Juxtaposition Is Not a Coincidence

In February 2026, Bridge Michigan published an analysis of 2025 lobbying disclosures. Advocates for special interests in Lansing itemized more than $485,000 on food and drink for legislators and executive branch officials, a record. More than $180,000 of that went to meals with individual legislators, roughly $40,000 above the previous high. Spending at group events, where lobbyists are not required to name who attended, topped $300,000.

One Clinton Township representative accounted for $12,508 in itemized meals, plus $4,574 in travel and lodging tied to a Beer and Wine Wholesalers Association conference at a Ritz-Carlton in the Turks and Caicos. Multiclient lobbying firms accounted for more than half of all reported individual meal spending, and those firms are not required to name the clients whose interests they are advancing when they pick up the check.

Here is the part that matters structurally. Bridge reported that ongoing problems with the state’s transparency portal kept the public from viewing the totals. The department acknowledged that some data existed in the system but was not displaying publicly.

That is not an ironic coincidence to be noted and moved past. It is a direct causal relationship between a procurement failure and a transparency failure. Michigan voters approved a constitutional amendment to see this information. The state built a system to deliver it. The system did not deliver it. The public learned the number because a nonprofit newsroom did the analysis, not because the mechanism the voters mandated worked.

The Same Contractor, the Same Failure Mode, Six Jurisdictions

Michigan’s experience is not isolated, and the point of saying so is not to indict a company. It is to identify whether the failure mode is idiosyncratic or structural. Idiosyncratic failures get fixed by changing vendors. Structural failures do not.

In Cook County, Illinois, an overhaul of the property tax system began in 2015 with a completion target of December 2019. The county has spent roughly $63 million on the effort, against an initial vendor award near $30 million. Bills went out four and a half months late for the 2024 second installment. Refunds stalled. Distribution of billions in property tax revenue to school districts and other taxing bodies was delayed, and districts borrowed to cover the gap. The county inspector general’s report, released in July 2026, spread the blame widely across elected offices and the contractor, and its summary judgment was that nobody’s hands are clean. Chicago Public Schools borrowed heavily and incurred substantial interest.

In North Carolina, the Administrative Office of the Courts signed a $100 million, ten-year contract in 2019 for eCourts, built on the Odyssey case management platform. It launched in four pilot counties in February 2023. Within roughly ten weeks, the AOC logged and reported more than 570 software defects. A federal class action followed, alleging people were arrested multiple times on the same warrant, including after dismissal, and held longer than their release conditions required. In April 2025, Judge Osteen denied motions to dismiss the negligence claim against the vendor. As of June 2026, the parties were finalizing a proposed settlement with no admission of liability. Claims against the Mecklenburg County sheriff remain pending.

The North Carolina complaint argued these outcomes were foreseeable, and pointed to a decade of prior implementations. Merced County, California, in 2011. Alameda County, California, in 2016, where public defenders identified cases of people wrongly arrested, held after they should have been released, or incorrectly told to register as sex offenders. Shelby County, Tennessee, where a class action naming county officials and the vendor settled for nearly $5 million. Lubbock County, Texas, where officials acknowledged the transition had caused people to be detained longer than necessary.

In Jackson County, Missouri, a $17.9 million contract for reappraisal services and mass appraisal software preceded a 2023 assessment cycle in which some owners saw valuations rise dramatically. The state auditor found the county’s process out of compliance with state law. The attorney general and the State Tax Commission sued. The county withheld $6 million pending deliverables.

The Accountability Gap Has a Legal Shape

Two courts have now confronted the same question from opposite directions, and the split is the most useful thing in this entire body of material.

In Missouri, property owners sued the vendor directly, alleging its negligent performance caused them not to receive timely notice of assessment increases and caused valuations to rise more than 15 percent without physical inspection. On December 19, 2023, the Missouri Supreme Court held the vendor was entitled to dismissal. The duties the owners described were the county assessor’s statutory obligations, not the contractor’s. The rule of privity applied, because the owners were not parties to the contract. The court reasoned that departing from that rule would expose contractors to excessive liability and discourage them from entering service contracts at all. The case is State ex rel. Tyler Technologies, Inc. v. Chamberlain, No. SC100298.

In North Carolina, plaintiffs pled a negligence theory rather than a contract theory: that the vendor breached a duty to deliver software free of defects that would cause unlawful arrests and detentions. In April 2025, the federal district court found that at the prediscovery stage the plaintiffs had plausibly alleged exactly that, and allowed the claim to proceed. The vendor had separately argued against class certification on the ground that each claim would require an individualized mini-trial into the circumstances of the particular arrest or detention.

Read the two together and the shape of the gap becomes visible. A government IT vendor’s obligations run to the contracting agency. The agency’s obligations run to the public. But the public’s harm, when it comes, is caused by the vendor, and the public has no privity with the vendor. The agency has privity but often has little incentive to litigate against a contractor it still needs to finish the job, and every incentive to characterize failures as ordinary transition friction.

Where liberty is involved, that gap becomes constitutional. A person held in jail past the point their release conditions were satisfied has a claim against the custodian. Whether they have a claim against the company whose software failed to transmit the release is, on the current record, jurisdiction-dependent. Michigan has no appellate authority on the question.

Why This Matters for Michigan Courts Specifically

Michigan’s exposure to court case management failure is real but partial, and the reason is a procurement decision the judicial branch made deliberately.

Some of Michigan’s largest circuit courts have run Tyler’s Odyssey platform. The Third Judicial Circuit in Wayne County implemented Odyssey in its Criminal Division in 2008 and still offers public case search through Odyssey Public Access. Kalamazoo County and Washtenaw County circuit courts followed. MiFILE, the statewide e-filing system sponsored by SCAO and built on ImageSoft’s TrueFiling and OnBase products, has to interface with whatever case management system a given court runs, including Odyssey. That integration layer is exactly where the North Carolina defects lived: not inside one product, but in the handoffs between products, and between courts and jails.

But most Michigan trial courts do not run commercial case management software. They run JIS, the judiciary’s own system. In October 2022 SCAO engaged the National Center for State Courts to evaluate whether the in-house platform could be expanded statewide. The NCSC concluded in March 2023 that JIS was “a viable and appropriate solution for the Michigan trial courts” and a more cost-effective option than commercial packages, which would carry higher costs and longer implementation timelines.

The Legislature funded the expansion with a $150 million one-time appropriation. As of February 27, 2026, 260 of Michigan’s 302 courts were on the JIS system, up from 243 at the start of fiscal year 2023. Ten courts migrated in the year ending February 2026, up from six the year before.

This is not a claim that the judiciary’s approach is trouble-free. The 2026 legislative report names its own problems plainly: data migration from legacy systems is complex and slowed by proprietary or restricted access to historical records, and local courts struggle to free up the staff time onboarding requires while still running a docket. SCAO requested 12 additional positions for fiscal year 2026 and did not receive them. It requested $38 million in ongoing maintenance funding beginning in fiscal year 2023 and reports that request has been consistently underfunded ever since.

The difference between the two programs is not competence. It is visibility. When the judiciary’s program runs into trouble, the trouble appears in a document the Legislature reads on a fixed schedule, in the vendor’s own words, with dollar figures attached. When the executive branch program ran into trouble, the record sat in an email inbox until a reporter filed a records request.

The Counterargument Deserves a Hearing

The strongest response to all of this is that enterprise government IT is genuinely difficult and that blaming vendors is the easy move.

That response has real support in the record. Cook County’s inspector general did not lay the failure at the contractor’s feet alone. The report described a project run across independently elected offices with conflicting agendas, without a dedicated project manager identified at the outset, and with undocumented institutional knowledge scattered across auxiliary systems that had their own formats and historical practices. The vendor’s chief administrative officer wrote publicly that the work depends on timely and consistent information from agency stakeholders. One materially significant delay in the distribution of tax revenue was traced not to the vendor but to county stakeholders testing against an incorrect file.

In North Carolina, the Administrative Office of the Courts has consistently maintained that it investigated the reported incidents and did not substantiate that the case management software caused a wrongful arrest or incarceration. The vendor’s position, stated through counsel, is that the plaintiffs’ claims lack merit and that any settlement would carry no admission of liability. Those are the parties’ positions and the litigation is not adjudicated.

And Michigan’s own judicial branch program, the in-house alternative held up here as the better governance model, has slipped schedules and named its own recurring problems for three consecutive reporting years.

All of that is true, and none of it disturbs the finding. The argument here is not that vendors are uniquely culpable. It is that the accountability architecture is asymmetric. When a project succeeds, the credit is shared. When it fails, the loss lands on people who were never party to any of it: the filer who cannot file, the taxpayer waiting on a refund, the school district borrowing against delayed revenue, the person in a cell after the paperwork clearing their release did not move. Shared fault does not mean shared consequences, and the current design gives the public no seat at the table where either is allocated.

What Fixing This Would Actually Require

Michigan does not need a new theory of procurement. It needs to apply, in the executive branch, a reporting standard the judicial branch already meets.

Mandatory annual public performance reporting on major IT contracts

SCAO publishes an annual legislative update on the statewide case management system. It itemizes expenditures by category, states how many courts are onboarded and how many are in progress, names the two largest implementation obstacles, and states what happened to its staffing and maintenance requests. That document exists because the appropriation carried a reporting expectation. Extending an equivalent requirement to any executive branch IT contract above a defined threshold would have surfaced MiTN’s problems in early 2025 rather than late 2025, and through a scheduled public filing rather than a records request.

Independent pre-launch verification, separate from the vendor and the buying agency

Both Michigan and North Carolina launched modules that the operating agency’s own staff had already identified as defective. A pre-launch technical review by a party with no stake in the go-live date, filed publicly, converts an internal judgment call into a documented decision someone has to own.

Sole-bidder review as a standing procurement trigger

A single qualified bid on a multi-year statewide platform should trigger automatic additional scrutiny, not simply an award. That review should include whether the bidder or an affiliate controlled the predecessor system, which was the question a House committee chair raised at the May 2025 hearing regarding the acquisition of the MERTS operator.

Liberty-impact incident disclosure for any justice system technology

Where a case management, jail management, or e-filing system touches release, warrant status, or detention, incidents in which a defect contributed to an arrest or continued custody should be logged and publicly reported at fixed intervals. North Carolina’s AOC logged more than 570 defects in ten weeks. That number is known only because it appeared in a complaint. Michigan has no equivalent reporting requirement for the courts running commercial case management platforms.

Third-party beneficiary language in justice system contracts

This is the direct answer to the Missouri holding. The court’s reasoning turned on privity, which is a default rule that contracting parties can alter. A state or county that wants its residents to have recourse against a contractor whose defects cause them concrete harm can write that into the contract as an express third-party beneficiary provision. Whether a legislature wants to require it is a policy question. Whether it is legally available is not. It is.