The people behind the numbers.

"We do not accept appeals and cannot override the outcome of the Tenant Screening."

Mary Louis had a housing voucher and a long rental history. A score said no, and the management company wrote back that nobody could change it. She found a place two hundred dollars a month more expensive, in a worse area. In 2024 a court approved a settlement under which the score is no longer shown for anyone using a voucher.

What the index sees: the landlord had authority on paper and none in practice, so both sides score low. Recourse arrived only through a class action, years later.

More than a hundred applications. Every one closed by the same software.

Derek Mobley applied through platforms running one screening system and heard no from all of them. One rejection, according to his complaint, arrived in the middle of the night, less than an hour after he pressed submit. A court has let thousands of applicants over forty join his case and ruled that the vendor can be treated as the employer's agent.

What the index sees: the applicant did not know a machine was involved, so every later step scores near zero. The vendor is treated as the employer's agent, which is where responsibility for a human option now sits.

"From one moment to the next, they no longer had any income."

Between 2018 and 2022, when Uber's software suspected fraud or saw a rating fall below a threshold, it switched drivers off. No warning, no person. More than 170 French drivers took their case to a human rights league, then to the regulator. Six years later Uber was fined 825 million euros. The words are the regulator's.

What the index sees: nobody had a human option, not the driver and not the company. A small gap here is the worst result, and only a two-sided score shows it.

Silence counted as guilt.

From 2013 to 2015 Michigan's unemployment system flagged tens of thousands of people as fraudsters without a person reviewing a file. Questionnaires went to old addresses. Wages were garnished and tax refunds seized. The state later acknowledged that nobody had double-checked the computer, and in 2024 a court approved a 20 million dollar settlement.

What the index sees: an appeal existed on paper and failed in practice. Recourse depth, not the existence of an appeal, is what the scale measures.

"No one could say why."

A father and his daughter, living in their car, qualified for food assistance, emergency cash and Medicaid, and were denied all three. Each call ended without a person who could explain the decision or take responsibility for it. Legal aid lawyers later traced the denials to the state's automated eligibility system, which they say had been wrongly rejecting people by the thousands.

What the index sees: a decision with no reachable human at any step. Medicare's WISeR program, which began screening some services in six states on 1 January 2026, is the next case in this cluster.