LITTLE ROCK — A catastrophic failure of the state’s new computer system was a real concern for Gov. Mike Huckabee and state employees working to steer the system past the June 30 fiscal year-end account balancing, e-mails among state officials show.
The flurry of e-mails in June obtained later by the Times Record’s Arkansas News Bureau contrasts with Huckabee’s later assessment that politics had motivated concerns raised publicly before June 30.
“It appears the doom-and-gloom scenarios that received so much attention in recent weeks were election year rhetoric,” Huckabee wrote in a July 9 e-mail newsletter distributed to subscribers who sign up on his Web site.
E-mails obtained under the Arkansas Freedom of Information Act show that Doug Elkins, Huckabee’s top technology official, was approaching June 30 with the same apprehension as Y2K.
The end of June marked the first full year of operation for the troubled new computer accounting system, called AASIS, the Arkansas Administrative Statewide Information System.
“... This should be treated with as much concern as the Y2K issue,” Elkins, Department of Information Systems director, wrote in a June 26 e-mail to three officials. “We have to be ready for the worse possible scenarios. ... ”
According to one e-mail, Huckabee was involved late on the night of June 28 with a problem that one official wrote could “kill” the year-end process of balancing the books.
“It’s Friday night at 10:50 and the Governor is asking what the status of the EBD (Employee Benefits Division) situation is,” Elkins said in a June 28 e-mail to several employees. “This has made its way from several agencies to him.
“You might recall this is one of the two issues that was foretold would severely hurt — if not kill — the year-end process,” Elkins wrote.
“I need an update now,” his e-mail concludes.
The Employee Benefits Division relies on state agencies to pay the division a portion of employee health insurance costs, but as the end of the year approached, many agencies had not paid the division since the state’s new computer system went online July 1, 2001.
It meant that the state faced carrying over unpaid balances of $8 million to $12 million to the next fiscal year, which created problems balancing the books, said Richard Weiss, director of the Department of Finance and Administration.
Hours before Elkins relayed Huckabee’s concerns about the matter, Weiss told reporters that the state had “closed out the books clean.”
On Friday, he stood by his earlier assessment. “Friday afternoon (June 28), the issue was closing out the fiscal year — our books and the treasurer’s books both reflecting that there were no negative fund balances. That was the issue of law,” he said.
But another critical reconciliation process continued through the weekend within his own agency, he acknowledged.
“The people were working feverishly to get the books closed out,” he said. “Did we have problems? Sure we did, but was it ultimately a success? Yes, it was.”
Sen. Mike Beebe, D-Searcy, said Friday it was not fair for Huckabee to blame the concerns about AASIS on politics.
“There’s nothing wrong with admitting that it isn’t politics and that they’ve got a problem,” Beebe said. “That’s been my gripe all along is that how the heck do you fix a problem if you try to ignore the fact or hide the fact or distort the fact that you’ve got one and blame it all on politics when their own internal memorandum and their own internal conversations ... suggest otherwise.”
Weiss said Huckabee’s political opponents have tried to make hay out of the problems related to AASIS, but he disagreed with the governor’s assessment that the doom-and-gloom scenarios were all politically motivated.
“Sure there were problems out there; I mean the governor is talking politically there, I think,” Weiss said.
Jim Harris, spokesman for Huckabee, said Huckabee stands by his comments.

Times Record

-- Anonymous, August 13, 2002

Answers

Y2K Archives

AK - AASIS Allows Illegal Payments

-- Anonymous, August 13, 2002