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Kansas officials are delaying the rollout of the brand new unemployment insurance system to give staff time to be trained.
Instead of going live last month as originally expected, the new cloud-based system built for the Kansas Department of Labor will go live Nov. 19. The system is being built by Tata Consultancy Services, which got a $41 million contract to replace the old 1970s-era mainframe technology that was blamed for inefficiencies during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Labor secretary Amber Shultz told a committee that the delay is for training, not because the new system isn’t ready.
“It’s imperative to me,” Shultz said, “that we delay because of the training. … It’s not about the functionality not being there, it’s about making sure that we can provide that level of service that is expected from this product and from our agency.”
In addition to customer service benefits, Shultz said weeks of training will also mean staff may find more bugs to fix or tweaks to make beforehand.
While Shultz said that “we had been shooting for the end of September,” the agency’s own timeline had previously called for the system to go live in August. That was based on Tata executives saying in 2022 that the platform would be ready in 26 months, a promise that was considered ambitious since the state had initially expected the modernization process would take three to five years.
Tata has experience doing similar work in other states but also had its share of troubles. It secured the contract, worth $41 million over nearly seven years, when the state’s first choice vendor refused a contractual demand and two other bidders were deemed unqualified.
Shultz said $25 million has been spent so far, which is within budget and within scope. Labor Department officials provided the Unemployment Compensation Modernization and Improvement Council with a live demo touring the new system during a virtual meeting on Wednesday.
Shultz said there will be mail, email and social media communications to educate claimants about the new system. There may also be a frequently asked questions page and videos explaining the process. She also said there will be news releases and an opportunity for media questions and answers, “So they can ask us questions and hopefully be able to help us with the narrative that this is better and it’s intuitive and this is a good thing.”
The antiquated system was supposed to be modernized more than a decade ago. It received new attention during the pandemic due to what the Labor Department described as “failures” when the system “all but collapsed” amid record unemployment rates and new federal assistance programs. Meanwhile, the state struggled at preventing fraudulent payments, which auditors later estimated was potentially as high as $466 million.
Gov. Laura Kelly blamed former Gov. Sam Brownback for stopping the modernization started by former Gov. Kathleen Sebelius.
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Jason Alatidd is a Statehouse reporter for The Topeka Capital-Journal. He can be reached by email at [email protected]. Follow him on X @Jason_Alatidd.
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Publish date : 2024-09-08 22:15:00
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