The government specializes in incompetence.

YET ANOTHER STATE COMPUTER FIASCO

By U-T San Diego Editorial Staff

The Sacramento Bee reported this week that the California Public Employees’ Retirement System was having so many problems with its new $514 million computer system that some retirees are getting notices that their health insurance policies are being canceled because of CalPERS’ nonpayment of premiums. That’s only the start. Thousands of retirees or survivors of retirees are struggling to get correct payments or any payments at all.

But what’s especially vexing is that this is what veteran observers of state government have come to expect. The information technology revolution may have transformed the private sector over the past generation, with many IT innovations originating here in the Golden State. Yet over and over again, efforts to take advantage of this revolution have gone haywire in Sacramento.

In 1994, a state audit found the Department of Motor Vehicles wasted nearly $50 million on a computer “modernization” project that would actually have yielded a slower computer system than the relic it was to replace.

In 1999, Gov. Gray Davis canceled an $18 million state program to integrate computer systems tracking welfare and social services recipients because it offered no hope of progress – the fifth failed effort at the same task that decade. The state ended up paying fines of nearly $1 billion for delays in meeting a federal mandate to have a functional computerized system to track child support payments.

In 2005, a Sacramento Bee report found that efforts to implement reforms of the state prison system were impossible to evaluate for their effectiveness because the state Department of Corrections – despite huge budget increases – had never set up a central computer database to track individual prisoners and employees as it was directed to do in 1992. This poor tracking led to more violence in overcrowded prisons and to arguably higher recidivism because of an inability to evaluate which prisoners would respond to programs meant to help them integrate back into public life.

In 2009, efforts to furlough state employees and reduce their pay were called impossible by experts in and out of state government because the state payroll system relied on decrepit computers using half-century-old programming language. The “21st Century Project” upgrade of the system – originally bid out to a contractor at $69 million – now seems likely to cost $500 million.

In 2011, a state audit lambasted a planned statewide computer system meant to link courts in all 58 counties. The audit said the system could end up costing $1.9 billion – seven times the original $260 million estimate.

And this is only an abbreviated list of the state’s computer woes. Now we have the CalPERS fiasco.

“This is the home of Silicon Valley; it’s so embarrassing,” said Debra Bowen, California’s secretary of state. Except that’s what she said back in 1999, commenting as a state senator on the welfare tracking debacle.

In 2012, this sort of nightmare isn’t embarrassing. It’s preposterous. We know Gov. Jerry Brown is a busy fellow with lots on his plate. But given the real-life nightmares these computer problems cause Californians, we hope his administration is determined to reverse the state’s pathetic record. Our status quo of costly incompetence is unacceptable. It must end.

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