Firm Says It Tried to Save DMV Computer Project
A key contractor in a failed $44-million effort to upgrade the California Department of Motor Vehicles’ computer systems said Wednesday that it met all the obligations of its contract and went out of its way to try to salvage the project.
But the spokesmen for Tandem Computer Corp. could not say why the six-year undertaking failed after such a large investment of public funds.
The DMV said this week that it had shelved the project because it will not work. A legislative subcommittee has asked for an investigation.
The state office of the legislative analyst said the modernization project may have met with failure because it was too big for the DMV to manage properly.
DMV Director Frank Zolin said some computer parts might be salvageable and thus the public loss could be reduced to about $16 million.
But Assemblymen Richard Katz (D-Sylmar) and Jim Costa (D-Fresno) said it appears that DMV contracts with Tandem and another vendor, the accounting firm of Ernst & Young, failed to include strict performance standards and penalties.
A spokesman for Tandem said his company fulfilled its contract and more.
“We met those contractual obligations and worked with (DMV) to try to solve issues that were not part of our contractual obligations,” said Tom Waldrop, an executive at Cupertino-based Tandem. “We were in fact accountable and did meet standards of performance.”
In New York, Mort Meyerson, an executive of Ernst & Young, said his company and the DMV mutually terminated their contract four years ago. He said his company completed less than one year of a five-year agreement for computer integration.
“We did not agree with the DMV on the future direction of the project. . . . We have no knowledge of what has happened since then,” Meyerson said.
Waldrop said Tandem was charged chiefly with providing basic hardware and certain software to enable the linking of driver’s license information to motor vehicle registration data.
Evan Nossoff, a DMV spokesman, said the Ernst & Young contract was jointly terminated when it “became evident that they seriously underestimated the work that needed to be done to complete the system.”
Asked who is to blame for the expenditure of $44 million on a project that has no hope of working, Nossoff said the department “is not playing the blame game.” But, he said, “if Tandem made any error it was in being too optimistic in 1991 that this project could be rescued. That’s when it was supposed to be up and running.”
