A.G. Gancarski
Wednesday’s meeting of the House Transportation & Infrastructure Subcommittee saw SunPass under scrutiny yet again.
The beleaguered toll collector and its contractor Conduent State & Local Solutions have been under fire for months, with Gov. Ron DeSantis on Wednesday calling the vendor a “huge problem.”
Concern has already been addressed in a Senate subcommittee. Invoices from last spring have yet to be sent out in some cases due to Conduent’s problematic upgrade.
“The changeover was scheduled to last five days and … be seamless,” noted chair Colleen Burton, a Lakeland Republican.
SunPass represents another break between DeSantis and his predecessor; Gov. Rick Scott had a financial stake in Conduent.
Gerry O’Reilly, South Florida District Secretary for Florida’s Department of Transportation, explained the rollout of the SunPass Centralized Customer Service System.
“Conduent handles all of the customer payment transactions for SunPass,” O’Reilly noted.
“Comprehensive testing,” despite happening for months, “clearly wasn’t good enough,” O’Reilly said.
June’s migration of databases from SunPass to the vendor, expected to take a matter of days, took until mid-August, creating a 4.4 million invoice backlog.
“The system was completely overwhelmed. It couldn’t process the number of transactions,” O’Reilly lamented.
“Those delays caused a lot of problems from a billing perspective,” O’Reilly said, with trips not being invoiced “efficiently” for a “subset of people.”
“That collection is ongoing,” the FDOT administrator said.
No plans exist to sue or clawback uncollected moneys yet, O’Reilly said, though such could be “further down the road.”
“This has been an eight month process,” noted Democratic Rep. Geraldine Thompson.
Some positives: that the contract with Conduent is “performance-based,” with deductions possibly adding up to 25 percent of invoices.
And no payments have been made from the state to the vendor since June, O’Reilly said, a number which adds up to “many millions per month” (he could not be more specific, alas).
Rep. Mel Ponder wondered how candidates for the contract were “vetted.”
“It shouldn’t have been a surprise to them, nor that their system couldn’t handle it,” observed the Destin Republican.
Indeed, “lessons” have been “learned,” O’Reilly maintained.
One comment
TJ
February 13, 2019 at 6:56 pm
Random anecdote: about two weeks ago, I got a bill in the mail for toll road usage while in South Florida. I used the road in May 2018, so the bill came eight months after my triggering the toll. Head scratcher.
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