Thursday, April 10, 2008

Performing oversight

Here's the clip (4:41) of me asking about the financial software:

Q: Who (or what) is responsible for this?

A: a confidentiality agreement... I’m willing to take the hit for that.

(Unfortunately, at the time, I didn't exactly catch the phrase "a confidentiality agreement.")

Anyway, as much as I'd like to... I'm not going to delve into this... I've already been put on notice about the blog and too much discussion. Nonetheless, I did ask two questions that needed to be asked... and need to be asked every time we have these significant cost overruns:

Who is the individual responsible for this?

What are the consequences for that individual?

Frankly, I think one of the main problems with asking these questions is not a lack of recognition that these are important questions. No, it's not that.

The problem probably has several parts, but in Cheshire... this is one of the main problems we face in asking these questions:

To which I must ask: Who's in charge?

Tim White

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Tim,
#1. Hold the first software company financially responsible and file a notion to take them to court to settle this issue.

#2. Pay $180,000.00 to buy software that will need upgrading for 700 town employees comes to almost $250 an employee without the guarantee that it will work is ridiculous.

#3. We have residents in this town who were directly responsible for payroll for 15,000 employees, why don't we utilize their knowledge of these programs to advise the council on the alternatives.

#4. UPS, a somewhat large company with over 400,000 employees outsources payroll and saves millions every year and holds the outsource company to a 99.9% efficiency rating or they pay the inconvenienced employee 4 hours pays if the error is not resolved within 48 hours.
Mike Rocci

April 11, 2008 1:02 AM
Anonymous said...

It seems like the lawyers are in charge. Imagine FIVE lawyers in that room at the same time and nobody could talk. Lawyers by the way have no idea of computer systems. That is par for the course I guess? Why didn't we have one person with a computer system backround at this meeting. No one in that room seemed to know what was going on. You council members have to get with it. Bring in experts when you are going to OK expenditures over $400,000 and $40,000 per year forever. Our staff is OK but they don't do system conversions for a living. We don't have all the details and most likely will never be able to obtain them to determine what trully happened because of the litigations. This is bad for the public. Another mistake that will cost the taxpayers much more than what was orginally budgeted and approved. This has to stop.

April 11, 2008 2:06 PM

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