Tim Ash, deputy state auditor, told the Senate Committee on Institutions on March 28 that his office’s 2023 audit of the Agency of Digital Services (ADS) found frequent schedule slips and cost increases on large IT projects and shortcomings in how progress is reported.

The audit examined six large ADS projects and the agency’s enterprise project management office. “The short story is our office did an audit of ADS back in 2023,” Ash said, summarizing the review and its motivation: the rapid growth of state IT spending and the need for clearer public information about project performance.

Ash said four of six audited projects exceeded their original cost estimates and most were delayed relative to original schedules. He described a high-profile example, a planned business portal hosted by the Office of the Secretary of State, where roughly $2,000,000 had been spent and the effort had “lingered in a transition state” after a vendor stopped responding.

Beyond individual project failures, Ash told committee members the central problem was how status is presented. ADS’s public dashboard and annual reports sometimes display only revised completion dates and updated costs, which makes projects appear on time and on budget even when they are years late or millions over original estimates. “The information that was being presented both to the legislature and the public so that you could understand in real time how projects were going was really inadequate for the task,” he said.

To address that, Ash described three recommended changes for the Legislature to consider: require that the ADS project “ABC” submission include host‑agency staff costs, require ADS to present original cost and schedule estimates alongside revised figures in dashboards and reports, and adopt a post‑implementation review practice to verify whether projects delivered the intended business outcomes. He said the first and second points (baseline reporting and staff‑cost inclusion) are in the House version of the bill under review but that the staffing‑cost language as drafted left it optional on the agency providing the data rather than mandatory.

On including host‑agency staff costs, Ash noted a specific case in which the Child Development Division allocated about $1 million of staff time to a project; omitting that amount understates a project’s true total cost. “To not have that million dollars in their project cost means that you're sort of understating the cost benefit when you're doing that initial review,” he said.

Ash said the third recommendation — requiring a method to confirm projects achieved measurable business goals after launch — was removed from later drafts at ADS’s request but remains important in his office’s view.

Committee members voiced support for greater transparency and signaled that the committee’s work on internal services and the capital bill made now an appropriate time to press for clearer reporting. Ash said he will send committee staff the dashboard link and model language his office recommends for the bill.

The committee did not take formal action on the bill during the session recorded in the transcript. Ash declined to predict consequences for specific projects; instead he framed the recommendations as tools to let legislators and the public “ask knowledgeable questions and get kind of a realistic picture of the journey that one of these projects has been on.”

Notes: the bill referenced at the start of the meeting was read aloud as “h 4 58. 6 6” on the record; the transcript does not provide a standard bill number format or full bill text within the recorded discussion.