Follow-up: Feds Freeze Funding on Troubled Child Support Upgrade Project
The federal government has temporarily suspended funding for a six-year-old project to upgrade the technology for the state’s antiquated child support enforcement system whose projected costs have risen dramatically ahead of initial estimates.
The Texas attorney general's office launched a $202 million project to upgrade its child support enforcement system in 2009. The original plan included a $70 million contract with Accenture to design, develop and implement the project. Child support enforcement is a shared responsibility of states and the federal government, so the federal government agreed to pay two-thirds of the project’s costs.
By 2012, agency officials realized that the project's costs were far higher than expected, and concerns were growing about Accenture's handling of its share of the work. By this summer, the project's price tag had grown by more than $70 million. More recent estimates pin the project's costs at more than $100 million above the initial $202 million budget.
Concerns about the project's "runaway development costs, overly complex systems, increased maintenance costs and significant delays" prompted the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Office of Child Support Enforcement to place a "funding freeze" on its share of Accenture's costs until more information is available, according to a letter from Mara Frieson, deputy attorney general for child support, to Texas Legislative Budget Board Director Ursula Parks. Frieson added that the federal government wouldn't restart funding until it received a detailed schedule "outlining tasks and resources necessary to complete the project" and a "Corrective Action Plan" outlining the causes of the repeated delays and the plans to fix them.
Read more: http://www.texastribune.org/2015/12/04/feds-freeze-funding-troubled-child-support-upgrade/
Earlier thread:
Paxton drops contractors on tech project that’s $107M over estimated cost