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House Co-Sponsorship Memoranda
House of Representatives
Session of 2017 - 2018
Regular Session
MEMORANDUM
| Posted: | July 6, 2018 03:48 PM |
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| From: | Representative Seth M. Grove |
| To: | All House members |
| Subject: | Information Technology Contractor Verification |
| During the past two years we have seen disturbing examples of how state government failed to manage Information Technology (IT) contracts as contracts ran late and well over cost. In some cases, such as the State Police Radio Network contract or the Department of Labor and Industry’s Unemployment Call Center contract; the state never received a working product for which hundreds of millions of taxpayers’ dollars were spent. Pennsylvania is not the only government entity to struggle managing It contracts as the City of New York went to court over fraud as an IT contract cost grew from $62 million to $720 million. As Pennsylvania continues to the effort to consolidate state IT services, the Commonwealth must also put into place safeguards to prevent IT contract costs from running over cost and allowing state agencies to verify every hour, for which they are billed by an IT contractor. In order to accomplish this, I plan to introduce legislation which would require state agencies to negotiate within their IT contracts that vendors only receive payment for billable hours which are verified. The verification of these billable hours must be done using which records information about work performed while an employee of the vendor is logging billable hours. The software will record this information by taking a screenshot every three minutes to ensure that billable hours paid by the agency are being used to complete the project. This screenshot will be made available to the agency both in real time and retroactively for review. However, to protect the employee’s privacy, the screenshot shall not include any personal or confidential information. Several states across the country have passed, such as Louisiana and Indiana, or like Rhode Island are in the process of considering a similar requirement on state agencies for IT contracts. In these states, legislators from both sides of the aisle, have worked together to save taxpayer money and improve productivity on state contracts. In light of the public and costly failures state government has experienced with managing IT contracts over the past several decades, I believe its time for state agencies to verify all billable hours for IT contracts. Please join me and co-sponsor this legislation to save taxpayer money and improve how state government oversees IT contracts. Should you have any questions contact Jordan Grant by email at Jgrant@pahousegop.com |
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| View Attachment | ||
Introduced as HB2610