Oregon Governor Kate Brown's request for the resignation of Employment Agency Director Kay Erickson may be cover for her years of lack of oversight, in multiple capacities. The agency has had multiple failures to issues unemployement checks to increasingly needy people, during the uptick in demand as people lost employment during the COVID-19 outbreak. Erickson, the director of the embattled agency, resigned on May 31.

The Oregon Employment Department computer system that issues checks to unemployed Oregonians is called the Oregon Benefit Information System, and it was subject to a state audit by then Secretary of State Kate Brown in August of 2012. The primary purpose of this audit was to review and evaluate the effectiveness of key general and application controls over the computing environment at the department.

In addition to other things, the audit found that, [T]he department did not always update the system to keep pace with some of the more complicated benefit program rule changes enacted by state and federal governments during the recent economic downturn. For example, staff had to manually perform important tasks such as examining previous claims and performing manual calculations in order to determine the correct benefit program to be charged.

The audit also described the scope of the problem. "During fiscal year 2011, department staff identified overpayments totaling approximately $32.6 million that were not the result of fraud." For instance, the audit continues, "[T]he department sometimes paid claimants twice for the same benefit week. For example, one claimant was paid an average of $501 per week for 12 weeks. When staff discovered these weeks should have been paid using a different benefit program the department paid these same weeks at the correct rate of $179 per week, bringing the total weekly amount paid to $680. Since the original payment was $322 greater than it should have been, making the additional payment to correct the error only compounded the problem."

To summarize, this audit -- which occurred under then Secretary of State Brown's watch -- revealed systemic problems with manually intensive solutions, further exposed by a smaller financial crisis.

In December of 2015, after Brown had become Governor, her newly hand-picked successor, current Secretary of State Bev Clarno performed another audit on the same computer systems, concluding, "These computer programs are inflexible, poorly documented, and difficult to maintain. Considering these factors, Employment should take steps to replace them with more robust and maintainable computer code.

Again, the benefits system was cited as deficient. "OBIS is not flexible enough to efficiently handle additional requirements, such as those that occurred during the latest economic downturn." Both audits additionally pointed to disaster recovery and security as weaknesses in the Employement Agency computer systems.

It's hard to imagine how Governor Brown escapes responsibility for the recent failures at the Employment Agency, and the support that they give to very needy citizens.

The Employment Agency has embarked on a lengthy Software Modernization program, started in 2015 and scheduled to conclude in 2025. It is mostly funded with federal money. Legislators have questioned the lengthy schedule of the project.




--Staff Reports

Post Date: 2020-06-03 18:03:30

Last Update: 2020-06-03 18:04:39