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Michigan Senate Committee on Appropriations <\/p>\n
MDHHS Chief Operating Officer David Knezek told a State Senate subcommittee in March that the agency had recently launched an artificial intelligence tool to review SNAP payments before they were issued.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe are doing a pre-certification enabled case read,\u201d Knezek said, and added that the AI tool had made it possible to review many more payments.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe’ve done 17,500 of them just in the last three months,” Knezek said. \u201cThis is a massive improvement using an AI tool over what can be done by an individual person or an individual team over the course of a year.\u201d<\/p>\n
In about 1,500 case reads, he said, the AI tool had \u201ccaught more than $150,000 worth of potential payment errors.\u201d<\/p>\n
Phil Mayer, a staff attorney at the ACLU of Michigan, wrote a letter to MDDHS asking<\/a> for more clarity on the role of AI and safeguards to ensure that payments that have been properly cleared are not being erroneously withheld.<\/p>\n \u201cWe want to understand what evidence they have that it works properly,\u201d he said. \u201cWe want to understand whether it makes mistakes particularly when reviewing complicated applications or second-language speaker applications and we want to know if they complied with the process of securing federal approval before moving forward with the technology.<\/p>\n “We have a real concern when \u2026 artificial intelligence is used to make decisions about benefits, particularly where there’s incentives to deny the benefits in error as here.\u201d<\/p>\n As part of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act \u2014 President Donald Trump’s signature tax-and-spending legislation \u2014 states with high error rates will be required to pay<\/a> a portion of SNAP benefits. As per the law, states with error rates higher than 6% will be responsible for covering a portion of their states\u2019 costs \u2014 up to 15% \u2014 for the program, which is usually federally funded.<\/p>\n Last year, Michigan\u2019s error rate<\/a> was nearly 10 percent.<\/p>\n In 2024, a different state agency finalized<\/a> a $20 million settlement after wrongly accusing 3,000 Michiganders with unemployment fraud. The Michigan Integrated Data Automated System (MiDAS) had sent<\/a> out automated messages to tens of thousands of Michigan residents citing them for wrongfully taking payments from the state\u2019s unemployment benefits program between 2013 and 2015.<\/p>\n