Secretary of State officials tell committee OPR is running a deficit and will seek data, fees and staffing changes

Deputy Secretary of State Lauren Pippert told the House Government Operations & Military Affairs Committee on Jan. 22 that the Office of Professional Regulation, a division of the Secretary of State’s office, has run a budget deficit for five years and will soon release a money-study report to guide funding options.

The report, Pippert said, is intended to fill data gaps about how staff time is allocated across professions before the office makes a long-term funding recommendation. "We just need more data and more understanding before we're ready to make a sustainable recommendation to this body," Pippert said.

The Office of Professional Regulation (OPR) licenses, certifies or registers roughly 162 license types and more than 80,000 licensees. Pippert described OPR as a special-fund agency that receives limited general fund support, meaning its revenue comes primarily from licensees. That funding model and an unusually large information-technology contract have contributed to multi-year deficits, she said.

OPR employs 42 staff and has an enforcement arm that includes six certified law-enforcement officers, Pippert said. The office receives about 600 to 800 complaints a year, investigates roughly half of those, and prosecutes about 100 cases annually. "We really do everything in our enforcement process to give people due process," she said.

Pippert credited the agency's licensing platform, the Next Generation Licensing Platform (NGLP), with major operational improvements and said the office is moving from a large implementation spend into a maintenance phase. The system went live in 2017, Pippert said, and a vendor change occurred around 2019–2020. She described NGLP features that let non‑IT staff configure complex application flows and reported average processing times she characterized as fast: most renewals processed within a day and most applications within 48 hours.

Even so, OPR leaders said IT costs remain a significant budget pressure and suggested the state consider multi‑year capital planning for IT. "We need to think about as a state building IT funds, capital funds, because IT systems are really expensive," Pippert said.

Committee members were told OPR will propose targeted, non‑renewal/non‑initial-license fee changes in its upcoming OPR bill — for example, charging for verification of good standing when another jurisdiction requests confirmation — and may ask for additional positions tied to new professions the office is onboarding. Pippert emphasized the office will present the money-study findings before recommending structural changes.

The office also described operational changes made during the COVID-19 pandemic, including temporary licenses and telehealth licensure pathways to allow graduates and out‑of‑state practitioners to practice when exams and travel were disrupted.

The money-study report will be released to the committee and used to inform the OPR bill later in the session; OPR officials said they will return with more detailed resource requests after the report is completed.