Mitch Perry
Among the five bills Gov. Rick Scott vetoed Tuesday was one that would have weakened Florida’s Agency for State Technology.
Scott’s veto earned some praise from Jeremy Ring, the former Yahoo executive and state senator who is running for Chief Financial Officer in 2018.
“For ten years, I worked to ensure that IT infrastructure was fortified and all sensitive data the State collects on individuals was secure,” Ring said in a statement Tuesday. “My first year out of office, the Legislature attempted to gut the Agency for State Technology, putting in peril the personal data of millions of Floridians.”
The legislation, sponsored by Spring Hill Republican Blaise Ingoglia, would have reduced the agency’s ”“top-heavy” management structure, eliminating “the deputy executive director, chief planning officer, chief operations officer, and chief technology officer.”
It also called for the agency’s Chief Information Officer (CIO) to have 10 years of executive management experience.
As FloridaPolitics.com James Rosica reports, the agency came under fire after an audit released last winter by Sherill F. Norman‘s office.
According to the audit, the agency failed to “review user access privileges for the mainframe, open systems environments, and the network domains,” kept an inaccurate “inventory of IT resources at the State Data Center,” and “State Data Center backup tape records were not up-to-date and some backup tapes could not be located and identified.”
Jason Allison, the agency’s Chief Financial Officer, resigned shortly after the audit became public.
Ring strongly supported the creation of a state IT agency, which was signed into law in 2014. Until then, Florida was the largest state in the nation without a CIO.
As reported in Government Technology, Florida’s IT agencies faced considerable challenges at the hands of the state’s Legislature to this point. In 2005, the Florida State Technology Office was shuttered after lawmakers cut funding. And in 2012, Scott pulled the Agency for Enterprise Information Technology, rather than allowing it to stand in title and function without funding.
Ring is the only major Democrat to enter the 2018 CFO race so far. The Broward County resident will publish a memoir about his time at Yahoo in the fall.
