Deb Lefever has gotten so frustrated trying to talk to a person when she has questions about her unemployment compensation that she puts off calling as long as possible.
View full sizeLabor and Industry Secretary Julia Hearthway announced at a news conference on Wednesday that the department is terminating its contract with IBM on a failed project to modernize the state’s unemployment compensation computer system. Rep. William Keller, D-Philadelphia, (at left) and Deputy Secretary for Unemployment Compensation Programs Gregg Shore look on. “I just don’t always have three hours to sit around and wait,” said the unemployed retail manager from West Lampeter Twp.
One time she called to inform the state Department of Labor and Industry that she got a job and had to wait three-and-a-half hours to deliver that news.
Another time she called near closing time and was told to leave a message with the time she would be available for a call back the next business day. The return call came before the time she said she was available.
So hearing the news on Wednesday that Labor & Industry had spent $153 million so far on what was originally supposed to be a $107 million computer modernization project to improve the process for dealing with the state’s unemployed didn’t go over so well with her.
“It’s such a huge waste. They could have spent that money hiring more employees to answer the phones!” Lefever said.
Labor and Industry Secretary Julia Hearthway said the department was terminating its contract with IBM Corp. because it simply was not going to do what it was supposed to do.
It was already 42 months behind and the cost of completing the project had grown from $107 million to what now is projected to be $170 million, she said.
But the public had never seen the benefits of the modernization effort because the switch had never been flipped from the 40-year-old legacy system to the new one IBM was building.
The legacy system requires a lot of manual work that is paper intensive and inefficient, Hearthway said.
“There’s hundreds of steps that you go through to actually get a check out to an individual for unemployment,” Hearthway said. “A modern efficient computer system would take all those steps and make it run very quickly, very smoothly.”
Claims would have been processed quicker and benefit checks would have gone out sooner if the system had worked, she said.
Instead, seven years after the IBM contract was executed, the department is now focused on shoring up the old system to last a little longer until a decision is made about a longer-term next step.
Hearthway compared the old system to a reliable old Chevy.
“It isn’t all that pretty anymore. It’s kind of a clunker but it gets you from Point A to Point B,” she said.
But unlike the system that IBM was building, she said, “it works.”
She said the IBM contract termination has been turned over the department’s lawyers to figure out how to unravel the deal. Meanwhile, IBM officials have said they are willing to work to resolve the issues.
A spokesman for IBM said the company had no further comment on Thursday beyond the statement issued on Wednesday, which was: “In complex information technology implementations, there is accountability on both sides for system performance and service delivery. IBM is fully prepared to continue to invest to bring the benefits of a contemporary unemployment benefits system to the State and its citizens, and we stand ready to work with the State to resolve this matter.”
Source Article from http://www.pennlive.com/midstate/index.ssf/2013/08/labor_and_industry_to_rely_on.html
