http://www.oregonlive.com/money/index.ssf/2013/11/oregon_employment_department_wasted_nearly_7_million_on_failed_software_project_could_spend_millions_more_to_clean_it_up.html#incart_river_default By Molly Young | myoung@oregonian.com
November 21, 2013 at 6:55 PM
The Oregon Employment Department wasted $6.9 million on a software project that never worked and now must spend another $1.2 million to bail out its old system.
The bleeding doesn’t stop there. The boondoggle may force the agency to repay $1 million or more in federal funding because the project is being canceled, according to a 2012 report obtained by The Oregonian.
An ongoing investigation by the newspaper has revealed the state agency wasted millions of dollars on faulty tech upgrades and stalled software projects. The document management project the agency is trashing is just one example. Several other projects are shelved for now without any price tag on how to fix them -- if they can be saved at all. As it stands, the state Department of Administrative Services is overseeing any further work and a California contractor is charting the tech division's path forward.
The new software was supposed to track and store hundreds of thousands of unemployment insurance documents as they flow through the agency. But the multi-million-dollar upgrade, which was found to have violated state contracting rules from the start, spiraled beyond time and expense estimates, according to documents obtained by The Oregonian.
Now the agency must pay $340,000 to get out of the flawed contract, and spend three times that on temporary fixes. The development surfaced during a legislative hearing Wednesday, at the same time lawmakers in a different committee were grilling officials about the state’s latest tech flop,
Cover Oregon.Signs of trouble within the Employment Department’s tech division have been apparent for years. The agency's top three leaders either left or were fired as the problems came to light.
**SCHNIPP**
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