Lawmakers say government needs to get better with IT projects
Published February 7, 2014
by Laura Leslie, WRAL. February 6, 2014.
State lawmakers received a postmortem Thursday on a failed effort to build a new tax-processing system – the latest government IT project to run into trouble – and said there has to be a better way to manage such projects.
The state Department of Revenue split with software firm CGI last month after five years of trying to build the TIMS system. Although the system can process some tax returns, it hasn't been able to handle individual income taxes, corporate income taxes or sales taxes, which combine to account for 89 percent of the state's tax revenue.
Total spending on the contract has topped $90 million.
"Let me get this straight," Rep. Dean Arp, R-Union, said during a meeting of the Joint Legislative Oversight Committee on Information Technology, "almost 90 percent of the budget was spent on this project, and we received nothing for it?"
Jeff Epstein, chief operating officer of the Department of Revenue, said the system has brought in some money – state officials have applauded it for finding $320 million in unpaid taxes – but officials finally decided they couldn't keep waiting on CGI to finish it.
"Our decision was how much longer are we going to go on with this, and when it does get done, is it going to do what we really need it to do?" Epstein told lawmakers.
CGI is the same company responsible for the defect-riddled rollout of the federal HealthCare.gov website used to enroll people for health coverage under the Affordable Care Act.
"When it comes down really to it, we've been defrauded in this state by a software company," said Sen. Ralph Hise, R-Madison.
Epstein said the problem is that the contract was written to favor the company, not the state. Rep. Joe Tolson, D-Edgecombe, said that has been a problem for years across state government.
"I don't know when we're going to learn how to go out and get the experts that can come in, tell us what we need to do and plan it," Tolson said.
Committee Chairman Rep. Jason Saine said it's time to rethink big IT projects, breaking them into smaller pieces with more accountability and more safeguards.
"Things are going to go wrong. That's just the nature of software," said Saine, R-Lincoln. "Whether you're Bank of America or Wachovia or any large organization, things happen, but we've got to better at how we react to that."
The committee also heard a report about the network outage that shut down NCTracks, the state's Medicaid billing system, for more than a day this week. Officials said Computer Sciences Corp., the contractor on that system, will be fined for the hours the system was down.
February 7, 2014 at 7:20 am
TP Wohlford says:
Well, I've worked for 5 states as an IT guy. And yes, I have some knowledge of that NCDOR situation.
First, 50% of all large IT projects fail. That is the real world. Why they fail is the subject of lots of study, but at least this should tell politicians (and activists!) who believe that a huge IT-based government agency can solve the ills of humanity that there is a 50% chance of failure.
What I see in both the DOR as well as the ACA examples are complete blundering by the elected officials as well as high-ranking career bureaucrats. It's not that the geeks don't have their issues -- gosh, do they ever! -- but they don't get there on their own.
The consensus from the NC DOR job faulted "scope creep". You keep asking for "more" and sometimes that takes a lot of time and effort to add "more". Note -- this "Scope creep" is attributed to all sorts of political appointees in 2 administrations (if not more).
And the postmortem from ACA is that the elected officials didn't tell CGI a lot of important info until after the November election, and then expected magic to happen within weeks to get back on schedule. And I can fully imagine the kind of internecine bickering as "sacred" data is shared with a project that had (and has today) serious security concerns.
So give the geeks a break. It's not a "CGI" problem, at least not entirely. In both of the project I've mentioned, people needed to be fired on the customer side.
February 7, 2014 at 10:52 am
Maury Moffitt says:
It is funny how these things were so bad and got so much negative feedback with a National roll out of the ACA. North Carolina seems to have problems with all of the computer systems. The problems is the people sitting in the meetings making decisions of who to hire and fire are not technical people but good friends of the political appointees. They are ignorant of the technical information regarding these projects and therefore can't provide the necessary knowledge about technical issues to prevent future problems or the ability to ask intelligent questions and interpret their responses. How many of these people has ever seen the white papers or know what they are.
