MONTPELIER — Vendor payment delays caused by the rollout of VTBuys, the state’s new digital procurement system, are a result of “human side” problems, not the technology itself, Vermont’s IT chief told lawmakers on Tuesday.
Denise Reilly-Hughes, secretary of the Agency of Digital Services, told the Joint Information Technology Oversight Committee that state departments and agencies have developed their own disparate processes for dealing with vendors and invoices over decades, and not all of these offices have completely switched to VTBuys.
That includes her own digital services agency, which Reilly-Hughes said had decided it would be “better for internal operations to hold off” on completely adopting VTBuys while the agency helped other state offices do so.
VTBuys, the new e-procurement platform, is intended to modernize the way the state government works with vendors, creating a single streamlined interface for bids, contracts and payments. Previously, the state relied on manual, sometimes tedious, processes. The new platform is set to create efficiency and unity across state governments, according to state administrative leaders.
Coding quirks delayed VTBuy’s launch in July, leading state business offices to resort to contingency workflows.
But in late August, Reilly-Hughes and Wanda Minoli, commissioner of the Department of Buildings and General Services, which encompasses the state’s primary contracting office, told lawmakers in the IT oversight committee that the state had gotten through VTBuys rocky debut.
Yet after that assessment, three vendors with the state told VTDigger about tens of thousands of dollars in delayed and missing payments — problems they blamed on VTBuys.
At Tuesday’s meeting, state officials addressed the complaints. If the media had identified three businesses decrying late payments out of thousands working with the state, “those are positive metrics,” Reilly-Hughes said.
Minoli, for her part, acknowledged a limited ongoing “backlog” of invoices, and said questions about delayed payments were among the top three VTBuys topics her department hears about from businesses.
As for parts of the state government still using old workflows rather than VTBuys, the department and agency heads said it’s happening more than they’d want but did not provide specifics.
The change to VTBuys has caused frustration for state government business offices, Minoli said. But there’s something those involved agree on, she said: “the state needed a procurement system.”
