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Lawmakers press Vermont Department of Labor on replacing decades-old FARS accounting system
Summary
At a May 7 Environment & Energy committee hearing, lawmakers pressed Department of Labor officials about whether Workday, the state's enterprise resource planning (ERP) product, can replicate the department's decades-old Financial Accounting and Reporting System (FARS) for federal reporting and cost allocation; officials said a detailed gap analysis and contingency planning are underway, with a target single go-live of July 9, 2028.
Representative Kathleen James opened the Environment & Energy committee hearing on May 7 to continue oversight of the statewide ERP modernization effort and to press the Vermont Department of Labor on whether the agency's long-running accounting system, FARS (Financial Accounting and Reporting System), can be replaced by Workday.
"FARS is really good at applying indirect overhead and allocated costs across all the different projects that we have," said Chris Winters, deputy commissioner of the Department of Labor, describing why the department has used FARS since it was brought online in 1987. Winters told the panel the department reconciles a monthly lumped total into the state's Vision system but keeps detailed project-level records in FARS because of complex federal award and reporting requirements.
Chad Worsnach, the department's chief financial officer, provided a technical illustration of the problem: FARS maintains project codes and cost centers that track indirect costs…
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