KATU-OR has discovered serious mismanagement of millions of dollars by the heads of Cover Oregon, the state’s Obamacare health exchange.
Cover Oregon is the state’s most expensive IT project in state history.
Federal grant money initially funded the health exchange with $48 million in 2010. Taxpayer money funded the project with $172 million in 2014.
The website is still riddled with problems: more than a dozen critical coding errors and it has not been able to enroll one Oregonian in a private health insurance plan.
A company called Maximus was hired by the state to provide independent oversight of the project and deliver monthly quality assurance reports.
On October 3, Maximus put the budget for the state health exchange in a high-risk category. It warned: "Current invoicing by major contractor lacks sufficient detail to fully represent all detail of the work performed…"
The major contractor for the Oregon health exchange was Oracle.
Similar concerns were raised in September by non-partisan state IT analyst Bob Cummings. Cummings expressed worry about the project’s money management.
He wrote a letter on October 22, 2012 to Carolyn Lawson, the Chief Information Officer for Cover Oregon who was in charge of the health exchange’s budget.
"It’s important to be able to show the federal government exactly how all the grant funds are being spent…From what I can tell from the QA finding, there is a concern that a major expenditure of $34.6 million has been made without sufficient detailed specifics as to exactly how it is spent in support of the HIX IT effort," Cummings advised Lawson.
Lawson attempted to defend the project’s spending on December 11 in front of the legislative oversight committee for Cover Oregon, telling them "We are developing with federal funds, we asked for $96 million, we got $48 [million], we are being very conservative in the way that we’re spending our money…"