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Legislative auditors and KDHE report delays and design issues in Clarus childcare replacement; go‑live pushed to October 2025
Summary
KDHE and Legislative Post Audit reported design errors, staffing changes at the vendor and schedule slippage for the Clarus childcare licensing replacement. Cost is tracking close to the $5 million ARPA allocation and the go‑live date was moved from June to October 2025.
Kansas Department of Health and Environment officials and Legislative Post Audit (LPA) staff told the Joint Committee on Information Technology that the Clarus childcare replacement project is in alert status because of milestone slippage tied to vendor staffing, document errors and unanticipated design work.
KDHE Chief Information Officer Bob Doan said the contract for a vendor‑hosted software‑as‑a‑service replacement was signed in January 2024 and work began in April 2024. The original go‑live date was June 2025; KDHE revised the schedule to October 2025 after recurring design‑document problems and reassignment of vendor staff.
“We had a project manager and business analyst assigned by the vendor who had historical knowledge of the product,” Doan said. He told the committee that the vendor later reassigned staff to other accounts and the new personnel lacked the institutional history, producing design documents with repeated errors and regulatory inaccuracies. KDHE reduced that risk by requiring the vendor to add internal review steps and additional staff, Doan said.
LPA monitor Catherine (Catherine/Katrin in transcript) reported that the project is satisfactory in scope agreement and was tracking in cost near the $5 million ARPA allocation; KDHE had spent about $1.8 million as of the monitoring quarter. LPA noted that Kansas Information Technology Office (KITO) project reporting in the state’s project system (CARS) showed an inconsistent status and contained out‑of‑date updates, a discrepancy LPA flagged to the committee.
Committee members asked whether the KDHE contract included financial penalties for missed milestones. Doan said he did not believe a clawback for staffing or milestone misses was in the contract.
KDHE and LPA also discussed downstream impacts from legislative changes: House Bill 2045 creates a new Office of Early Childhood, and KDHE staff told the committee that branding and report changes for the new office will require additional configuration work that could add cost and delay the go‑live date unless final requirements are resolved promptly.
KDHE and LPA emphasized the project remains an active effort; officials said they were working to finalize a revised schedule baseline and expected to report progress at future committee meetings.
