Complaint Review: South Carolina Government DMV DPS

DMV PROJECT PHOENIX WASTE, FRAUD AND ABUSE
South Carolina, Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV)
Used to be the Division of Motor Vehicles (DMV) Under
SC, Department of Public Safety (DPS)

REF: Project Phoenix MAJOR SCAM TO TAXPAYERS:

1. Computer Systems purchased by DMV
2. Document Management System
3. Database Application
4. Printers
5. Salary Raises
6. Contractors: CACI and PWC

Administrative People:

Boykin Rose Director DPS (Not sure of the total
involvement maybe 50%+)
David Burgis former Director of DMV (100% involved)
Marcia Adams - Executive Director of DMV former Assistant to David Burgis (100% involved)
Jimmy Earley Information Technology (IT) Administrator (100% involved)
Philip Cockrell Network Manager (100% involved since 2001)
Wonda Uswa Field Office Administrator (100% involved)
Beverly Hamilton Field Office Administrator (100% involved since 2002)
Budget and Control Board (100% involved)
Peggy Faulty (100% involved)
Sherion Lewis (100% involved, even seen tampering accounts to reflect no trouble)
Mira ?? (not sure of last name) (100% involved, would sign off on purchases with Jimmy Earley/David/Marcia)
Other High-Level DMV Administrative Staff (Do not know all names-100% involved)
(Todd Hill, Walt Overbay, Ray Boist, Other Present Employees with Big Raises contribute to the SCAM) (Any IT staff that talked about the abusive concerns was fired, relocated or demoted)

All of these people are involved and have approved the mismanagement of state funds for the Project Phoenix. Project Phoenix could be an efficient and beneficial project if the administrative people possessed the proficient working IT background, but in the IT staff's opinion, none of the above administrative people possess the skills of IT policies or project oriented experience.

Instead the administrative people go against the advise of the IT staff who do possess the expertise for this type of project. The IT staff believes these administrative people are abusing the state funds. Because of the suspected state funds abuse, many former state employees have been required to take early retirement. The IT staff also believes that the current state employees are not receiving deserved raises and have been given reduced salaries; whereas, the administrative staff are receiving substantial raises and I believe on numerous occasions have wasted state funds.

1. DMV Computer Systems: The administrative people bought computer systems that were known not to support the DMV daily workloads. During the year 2000, the administrative people purchased large numbers of HP E-Vectra computer systems, which in fact were warned by IT staff that the HP E-Vectras would not support the DMV workloads. The Administrative staff went against the IT staff's advice and purchased the HP E-Vectras. During the Project Phoenix's hardware rollout, year of 2001, which included the HP E-Vectras, the administrative people discovered that the HP E-Vectras were not operating or functioning to the DMV workloads.

Once the Field Office staff began complaining on a regular basis about how badly the operational performance was of the newly purchased computers, the administrative people tried to secretively replace the HP E-Vectras with better performance
computers for example, Dells and a higher-grade HP computer system. Even these newer computers, Dell and HP higher grade, still do not handle the DMV workloads. This was also advised by the IT staff.

2. Document Management System (DMS): The administrative people were warned that the contractor, CACI, was not providing to the state of South Carolina the Document
Management System (DMS) that was outlined in the contract.

Most of the function that the contractor, CACI, provided was Free Off The Shelf software that came preinstalled with MS Windows, MS Paint. The state of South Carolina paid the contractor, CACI, US$2.6 million dollars to provide a working DMS.

The administrative people signed off for the DMS and when the DMS went out to the Field Office the DMS failed completely. The administrative people had the entire Field Office DMS returned to the Project Phoenix Head Quarters at Outlet Point
where it sits to this day.

The administrative people are in the process of paying more money to replace DMS with another DMS. The administrative people do not want anyone to find out about this replacement because of the waste of state funds.

There is one approval of 50 Dell computer systems that have been taken out of the Budget and Control Board's funds to start this replacement process. The 50 Dell computers have been purchased and are being implemented.

3. Database Application (DBA): The administrative people approved the DBA software, even though they were thoroughly warned, by IT staff, of the potential problems that would happen if proper procedures were not taken seriously.

For example, the older DMV database was written on a software language that is sensitive to other software packages. In order to communicate to the older DMV database, the state would provide a bridge type software that would communicate between the new DMV database software and the older DMV database. If the state did not properly plan out this procedure, the DBA would end up costing the state more to fix the problem, than the initial total amount. The fact is, the administrative people rejected the advise of the IT staff and never evaluated and planned the process.

Instead, the administrative people went over US$5 million (and counting) to the contractor, CACI, to provide a sloppy DBA software package. The administrative people know the new DBA software is not working and has caused many statewide crashes.
The administrative people are trying to cover up this blatant mismanagement of state funds and destroy the physical evidence by paying out more money to fix the problem. The administrative people have paid the contractor, CACI, to provide this database, even though they had already had state employees do the work for the contractor, CACI, to try and fix the problem for the contractor. In other words, they paid twice for the same work.

4. Printers: The administrative people purchased printers to be put along side the DMV computer systems in every Field Office around the state. These new printers are not designed to do the required workloads of the DMV Field Offices.

The administrative people were advised not to purchase these types of printers by IT staff. Instead, against the advise of the IT staff, the administrative people purchased these printers. When the printers failed, the administrative people are now in the process of replacing these printers with newer printers. This is costing the state extra amounts of funds that could have been saved and better utilized if only the administrative people would have listened to the IT staff.

5. Salary Raises: The administrative people continue to increase their salaries by as much as 10-30% every year. The sad fact is the administrative people have been warned of the misuse of funds in systems that would not work.

The administrative people continue to purchase new systems to replace those systems, which are only a year old, while at the same time giving themselves raises. The good state employees are getting laid off or getting salary cuts while the administrative people line their pockets. WHERE DOES IT END?

6. Contractors CACI and Price Waterhouse Coopers (PWC): One interesting thing is the contractor, CACI, point of contact, Mike Cukura, is a reporter for the, State Newspaper, located in Columbia South Carolina.

Why has this POC not written the story of what is happening behind the scenes? It has been heard that this reporter has a conflict of interest because he is getting funds to be the POC and not write anything within the Project Phoenix Scam. In other words keep his mouth shut. The other interesting thing is the state hired an accounting firm, Price Waterhouse Coopers (PWC), to glance over the books and make sure the project is being followed according to the contract.

There are many accounts where PWC fixed the books and even took work from state employees and charged the state for the same work that the state employees had already performed.

Whenever this frustrating abuse was being conducted by PWC, the administrative people would hammer the state employees down and harass the state employees into silence. They even sneaked and loaded porn material on one employee because he refused to be a part of this.

There was a Call Center program that an IT staff worked on, in which PWC took all the work away from this IT staff person and claimed the work for PWC and then charged the state US$100,000 for the work.

The administrative people knew the Call Center work had been conducted by the IT staff and when this concern was brought to the attention to the administrative people by the IT staff, the IT staff was harassed by the administrative people.

Large amounts of money have been pumped into the pockets of the contractors, CACI and PWC, for work that has already been done by state employees all at the approval of the administrative people.

Another concern is the fact that PWC won the initial contract back around 1998-1999 at a bid for a Fixed Firm Price (FFP) in a single-time contract. Without going out on a rebid to the other competitive companies, the administrative people and PWC reworked the contract to be flexible on pricing and jointly developed the Statement Of Work (SOW).

Under IT staff's knowledge of the legal guidelines, IT staff believe this is unethical and very illegal mainly because this cut out any fair bidding process to any other qualified company that could have bid at a lower cost than PWC. IT staff have enclosed examples of a few emails between the administrative people and PWC outlining what IT staff believe to be the probable cause of IT staff's suspicions, that this is a scam and a biased occurrence.

This unethical, and IT staff believe illegal practice, is not just limited to just PWC. For example, around August 2000, CACI and the administrative people, worked on a SOW for a network contract bid. After the Request For Purchase (RFP) was awarded to CACI, another qualified company complained that they had a lower price than CACI which was stated in a letter to the administrative people as to why the lower bidding company did not win the bid. The administrative people responded that CACI was more qualified. This was such a big fat lie! Again, this gives the appearance of wrongdoing of illegal activity between the contractors and the administrative
People.

NOTE:
1. There was a hired (in 2001) state employee Philip Cockrell, IT Network Systems Manager of DMV, who just happened to have strong connections with Pomeroy, which is a subcontractor of CACI.
2. Another hired (in 2001) state employee Todd Hill, Senr. Information Resource Consultant, who was a recent employee of a subcontractor of CACI.
3. Another former state employee (1998), Janice (not sure of last name) was hired by CACI (in 1998) to assist between the administrative people of the state and CACI for contractual communications.


The state is paying way over the amount of what this Project Phoenix should have cost. The cost of Project Phoenix, over The next few years, will have cost the state an estimated over US$200 million.

This does not include the continued 10-30% administrative people's salary raises, which have been going on since Project Phoenix started.

The listed facts above is just a few observed by IT staff and other state employees, if an investigation is conducted, I sincerely believe there are other evidences of waste, fraud
and abuse of state funds by these same administrative people.

Other beneficial state programs, such as education and health projects, are not getting the critical funding. This is short-changing our worthy members of the great State of South Carolina, not to count the fact, the children, who are our future, are being deprived and robbed by this bunch of crooks through the back door-method of the Project Phoenix White Elephant Scam.

Where does it end? State Employees who have spoken up have been harassed, disciplined, demoted, fired, and passed over for promotions because they love the State of South Carolina and are tired of seeing these people get away with this.

Hopefully this document will trigger an investigation and bring these criminals to justice and send a message that somebody does care about this waste, fraud and abuse.

===END OF DOCUMENTATRY MEMORANDUM REGARDING EVENTS SUPPORTING SUSPICIONS OF UNETHICAL BEHAVIOR ===


SAMPLE PROBABLE CAUSE EMAILS BETWEEN PWC AND ADMINISTRATIVE STAFF


===EMAIL BETWEEN PWC AND ADMINISTRATIVE PEOPLE PART1===

-----Original Message-----
From: Thomas, Lottie
Sent: Thursday, September 26, 2002 10:05 AM
To: Adams, Marcia S.
Subject: RW:FW: Contract Modification
Importance: High

Marcia,

The Total Potential Value : $2,975,649.00 does not include the
current contract price. Suresh is already aware of this and
is working directly with Bruce Breedlove in MMO. Thanks.

Lotte

-----Original Message-----
From: Adams, Marcia S.
Sent: Thursday, September 26, 2002 9:41 AM
To: Thomas, Lottie
Subject: FW: Contract Modification
Importance: High

The approval is here. What do you need to confirm?
-----Original Message-----
From: Deloach, Dixie
Sent: Wednesday, September 25, 2002 11:04 AM
To: Earley, Jr., James E.; Cockrell, Philip C.
Cc: Johnson, Elaine; Royal, Patti A.; Burgis, David; Royal,
Don; Green, Gwendolyn; Matthews, Gene; Adams, Marcia S.
Subject: Contract Modification
Importance: High


PwC's BPI Contract Modification, approved by CIO, is attached.
Thanks for all of your assistance.
Dixie >

===END OF EMAIL BETWEEN PWC AND ADMINISTRATIVE PEOPLE PART1===

===EMAIL FROM PWC TO ADMINISTRATIVE PEOPLE PART2===

To: Jake M. Richards/US/MCS/PwC@Americas-US
cc: Thomas_Lottie@SCDPS.State.SC.US
Subject: Draft of Jimmy's letter

Looks fine to me. Nice work, as usual!

Lotte Thomas
12/12/2001 11:18 PM

To: Jake M. Richards/US/MCS/PwC@Americas-US
cc: Thomas_Lottie@SCDPS.State.SC.US
Subject: Draft of Jimmy's letter

Jake:
Draft of letter to Jimmy. If this is ok, could you let me know via my DPS email or leave me a message on my DPS voice mail? I want to get this to Jimmy so he has it before he talks with Marcia on Friday.

thanks
Lotte

Dear Jimmy:

Per our discussion, PwC is prepared to provide continued Implementation assistance for project Phoenix in the period between January 2002 and the beginning of process training and extended pilot (currently estimated to begin on or about April 1) to encompass the following activities:

Lotte Devlin:
50% in preparation for training, including training trainers in Driver License, Violation and Suspension and FR processes, identifying needed updates, corrections etc. to process and training material.
Goal is to have trainers ready to assist with and/or deliver training. There are currently 5 DMV trainers.

50% implementation assistance. Development of implementation plan to include communication, operations and technology actions and events that need to be accomplished before rollout; ongoing updating of milestone chart to ensure activities are being completed; continued support of technology updates, fixes, final specifications. resulting from testing issues and recently completed EC activities.

Kathy Hicken:
50% in preparation for training, including training trainers in Titles and Registration, Revenue and Accounting and Inventory processes, identifying needed updates, corrections etc. to process and training material.

50% in development of process/policy/procedure update system and developing any additional needed procedures. As we discussed, the logical locus for this activity should be the Admin Team. We will focus on issues of: What should manual look like, how will it be updated, who will be responsible for updating, what will be the process for approving additions, deletions and changes, etc. Lotte will help with the start up of this activity and then Kathy will take over bringing it to fruition.

We also are aware that additional procedures may need to be written, and that these will need to be carefully prioritized. Given the constricted time period and the non-availability of the core team and other key DMV resources due to their testing obligations, we suggest that we begin with a review of the current procedural memorandum manual, identifying which procedures/policies need to be updated, deleted, etc., and tying the procedures/policies to a particular business process. We hope to be able to enlist the assistance of Ursula Adams in these activities once she
returns to work.

Shawn Goff:
100% in process/training support. Shawn is currently working on getting the data call together to create/identify test customers to carry out the process training exercises. Shawn will also be responsible for keeping the master process and training manuals and making sure that they are in a readiness status one month prior to training delivery. He will also be working directly with the trainers under my guidance to ensure that their trainer materials meet their needs.

Once the details of actual process training delivery are worked out, we will provide an addendum detailing PwC's support activities during the training period.

All activities except for actual delivery of training will be completed by March 31, with deliverables to include:

Final Process Manual
Final Training Manual for Users
Final Trainer Manual for Trainers
Final Rollout Implementation Plan
Updated Rollout Milestone Chart
System design and description for updating process/policy/procedures Integrated Process/Policy/Procedure manual to reflect process-related policies/procedures identified/created/categorized as of March 8 (need time to prepare deliverable prior to final training prep activities).

Please indicate your acceptance of these proposed activities by signing this letter. Should you have any additional questions, I'd be most happy to discuss them with you.

Lotte Devlin
Project Coordinator
PricewaterhouseCoopers

===END OF EMAIL FROM PWC TO ADMINISTRATIVE PEOPLE PART2===

===EMAIL Of Problems Between Administrative People Part3===

-----Original Message-----
From: Earley, Jr., James E.
Sent: Wednesday, June 19, 2002 1:28 PM
To: Sojourner, Frederick E.
Cc: Adams, Marcia S.; Sessions, Betty R.; Burgis, David;
Dolder, Rolf P.; Thomas, Lottie; 'bbriggs@caci.com';
Neiswonger, William D.
Subject: RE: Marcia's Thursday (May 30) Inquiry

Here's my understanding of the question:

Data entry has a backlog of over 225,000 DL applications. This group would like to continue to use the Microfilm system to microfilm these apps and enter the roll/frame information on the TARTAN system. This will work and will not impact Phoenix as long as the information entered on TARTAN is roll and frame info only. In this case, the mainframe could be updated with a file from TARTAN (post Phoenix deployment) and
the mainframe system could be available for research. We
would then need to choose a cut-over date for "new"
information to be scanned into the Phoenix Document Management system and entered into the Phoenix system.

If, in processing the DL applications, any information is
keyed into TARTAN that would later be used to update driving or vehicle records on the mainframe, we have a problem that would impact Phoenix. After Data Conversion begins on July 26, we will have no way of moving updated mainframe records to the Phoenix database. In other words, no TARTAN updates for
driving or vehicle records can be supported after July 26.

Please let me know if we are talking about roll and frame
updates only.

-----Original Message-----
From: Sojourner, Frederick E.
Sent: Tuesday, June 18, 2002 5:29 PM
To: Earley, Jr., James E.
Cc: Adams, Marcia S.; Sessions, Betty R.; Burgis, David
Subject: Marcia's Thursday (May 30) Inquiry
Importance: High

Jimmy,
THIRD REQUEST
Fred

-----Original Message-----
From: Sojourner, Frederick E.
Sent: Thursday, June 13, 2002 09:35 AM
To: Earley, Jr., James E.
Cc: Burgis, David; Adams, Marcia S.; Sessions, Betty R.
Subject: FW: Marcia's Last Thursday (May 30) Inquiry
Importance: High

Jimmy,
SECOND REQUEST

Fred

-----Original Message-----
From: Sojourner, Frederick E.
Sent: Thursday, June 06, 2002 12:29 PM
To: Earley, Jr., James E.
Cc: Adams, Marcia S.; Sessions, Betty R.; Burgis, David
Subject: Marcia's Last Thursday (May 30) Inquiry
Importance: High

Jimmy,
Marcia called you last Thursday, May 30, 2002, to obtain a status report from you on whether after June 28, 2002 (revised date - July 31, 2002) Data Entry could have utilization of the Tartan System and Records Management continue with the Microfilm Operation. Betty Sessions and I were present and it was our understanding you would have to consult with CACI and advise us of your decision. We have not heard from you as of
this date(one week). Your response effects work type
scheduling of employees in July and August , annual leave and obtaining overtime pay approval . When can Marcia, Betty and myself expect a response ?.
Fred

Fred Sojourner, Administrator
DMV General Administration
South Carolina Department of Public Safety
Telephone (803) 737-0980 206-5853 (cell)
E-mail: sojourner_fredericke@scdps.state.sc.us

===End Of EMAIL Of Problems Between Administrative People Part3===

Whistleblower
Columbia, South Carolina
U.S.A.