From the opening
A woman in Michigan had just finished her training to become a police officer in Detroit. Then she failed the background check, and the job went away. What the check had flagged was a finding of fraud. Years earlier she had collected unemployment benefits, and a state computer system had decided, on its own, that she had lied to get them. She had never been told. No person had ever looked at her case. No human had decided anything about her at all.
The system was called MiDAS. In the same stretch, the agency laid off nearly its entire fraud-detection unit. The humans who used to make the call were gone, and the call still had been made. It was made wrong most of the time: roughly forty thousand people wrongfully accused, a false-determination rate later placed between eighty-five and ninety-three percent, at least eleven thousand families in bankruptcy. The one thing that finally fixed the machine was the simplest thing imaginable. Put a person back into the decision.
That is the whole of this book in a single case. A consequential judgment was delegated to a system with no accountable human owner, and the cost fell on people who were never in the room where it was decided, because by then there was no room and no one in it. This book is about that room, and about the person who is supposed to be standing in it. It is about the call.
