House Budget Committee Chairman Brady Deaton, a Republican from Noel, speaks during a Jan. 30 news conference with House Speaker Jon Patterson. (Tim Bommel/Missouri House Communications)
The failures of a new $100 million Missouri state accounting system disrupted plans for the House Budget Committee to put its imprint this week on the spending plan for the coming fiscal year.
The system purchased in 2022 from Accenture was supposed to be in the final phase of implementation at this point, with all financial processes — including tracking for state appropriation decisions in the legislature — fully operational by September 2024, the contract states.
House Budget Committee Chairman Dirk Deaton cancelled a meeting Tuesday where he was supposed to present his revisions to the state budget. At that point, he said in an interview with The Independent, he would have given members a deadline for submitting amendments for consideration at an all-day meeting on Thursday.
But the system, called MOVERS, was unable to produce the appropriation bills. So far, the state has paid Accenture more than $60 million.
“It’s safe to say MOVERS isn’t moving very well,” Deaton said. “I’m not the expert on it and I’ve not been totally read in myself, but it’s certainly been a challenge. It’s not the only challenge, but it hasn’t helped.”
Accenture did not respond to emails seeking comment on the criticism.
On Wednesday, when Deaton was able to deliver a spreadsheet of his proposed changes to Gov. Mike Kehoe’s proposed budget, one of the items he cut was $410,000 for “post-implementation staff” for the new system.
“I’ve only grown in my belief that we shouldn’t do anything more until we get what we have right, and we’re far from it,” Deaton told members of the committee.
The system has failed to deliver on any of its promises, said Senate Appropriations Committee Chairman Lincoln Hough, a Republican from Springfield.
“I haven’t seen anything come out of the thing yet,” Hough said. “This is far beyond the old, it’s a new system, and so there’s gonna be some growing pains, and we’re gonna have to tweak this and tweak that. It doesn’t work.”
State Budget Director Dan Haug wasn’t as critical of the new system as the legislators, but did say it is having problems meeting expectations.
“There’s certainly been some hiccups,” Haug said. “I’m not going to say that there aren’t problems with it, but we’re trying to work through it the best we can.”
During a 90-minute meeting Wednesday, Deaton read through about one-third of his proposed changes to the $53.7 billion spending plan Kehoe proposed in January. Deaton’s proposal cuts about $2.2 billion from operational spending, including a cut in general revenue of about $750 million.
The committee recessed for the morning floor session with plans to finish working through Deaton’s proposals in the afternoon.
In items he did reach in the morning, Deaton proposed cutting Kehoe’s state employee pay plan in half, allowing a 1% raise for every two years in state service up to 10 years for a 5% cap. Kehoe proposed giving the raise for service up to 20 years with a 10% cap.
Deaton also cut $106 million intended to make federal child care subsidy payments based on authorization of slots rather than actual attendance by children. The current system, also changed to new computer software, has been plagued by delays and missed payments.
The money is coming from federal sources now but will have to be paid from general revenue in the future, Deaton said.
“It’s not a sustainable funding source,” Deaton said.
Deaton also did not include $300 million needed to fully fund the state foundation formula’s State Adequacy Target, and he made $15.2 million added to school transportation funds a one-time item.
General revenue is not growing at the rate it had in previous years and budgeting is becoming tighter, Deaton said.
“We need to understand that just because something’s maybe added this year, it wouldn’t be right to go ahead and budget that in for future years,” Deaton said.
Rejecting Kehoe’s proposal for prospective payments to child care providers is going to continue a system that isn’t working well, said state Rep. Betsy Fogle, the ranking Democrat on the House Budget Committee.
“Having those dollars stripped out was a disappointment, not only for myself, but to families and to child care providers back home who have been living in the throes of a very difficult fiscal reality because of the actions of this body,” she said.
Democrats will continue to push for prospective payments and to fully fund the foundation formula, Fogle said.
“That is another thing that we’ve been very vocal on as members of the House Democratic budget team,” she said.
The problems blamed on MOVERS upended plans to get the committee’s work finished this week. If that timeline had been met, it would have been the first time since 2020 when the House Budget Committee finished work before the break. In the 10 years prior, the budget was finished in committee only once after the break and in two years, it was sent to the Senate before the break.
Instead, the mark-up meeting will take place after lawmakers return from the upcoming mid-session break. Depending on how quickly formal budget bills can be produced
The delay is frustrating for Hough, who now does not expect to receive the budget until the week of April 7.
“When I was in the House, it was pretty much customary that we got the budget over to the Senate before we left for spring break,” Hough said.
Fogle said it is difficult to wait for solutions to the computer system rather than discuss spending.
“It hasn’t lived up to the expectation that we’ve set for it, and that frustration, I think, the chair did a good job of echoing today in the committee,” Fogle said.
For decades, Missouri’s financial administration was conducted on a mainframe computer running a program written in COBOL called SAM II. It drew complaints for years but accomplished the tasks needed.
The upgrades that were supposed to be available with MOVERS were intended to speed up the budget process, among other improvements. In the old system, decisions as they were made in committee hearings were entered into a computer program called BRASS, then exported to a spreadsheet where calculations were checked before being written out as a text document in formal bill form.
The new system was supposed to reduce the complexity of that process.
“It seems to work at this point, but not necessarily as good as the system that we had,” Deaton said. “A step backwards seems less than acceptable.”