Vermont Legislature SmartTranscripts:

[Speaker 0]: We're live. Alright. Welcome everybody to House Energy and Digital Infrastructure. We are continuing to take testimony on the FY twenty seven budget so that we can write our letter of recommendation to House of Props, which is due a week from Friday. So, we have taken some introductory testimony on the EDS budget and changes to that in the way it's being presented this year, and we want to make sure that we understand that. We have invited the Commissioner of the Department of Finance and Management to join us today to shed additional light. So Commissioner, we'll go around and introduce ourselves. We always ask everybody in the room to introduce ourselves because I like to know who's on the benches, and then we'll turn it over to you. So I'm representative Kathleen James from Manchester.

[Rep. R. Scott Campbell (Vice Chair)]: Scott Campbell, Saint George, Mary. Chris Windham, Windsor Bennington. Michael Southworth, Caledonia too. Christopher Howland, 104.

[Rep. Dara Torre (Clerk)]: Dara Torre, Washington too. Recognize you. Laura Sibilia, Windham too. Great.

[Lisa Gobin (IT Consultant, Joint Fiscal Office)]: And Lisa God, an IT consultant for Dan.

[Commissioner Adam Greshin (Department of Finance and Management)]: Oh, hey. Hi.

[John Kelly (ADS staff)]: John Kelly, ADS, chief side.

[Commissioner Adam Greshin (Department of Finance and Management)]: Great. Dana Mayberry from the group.

[Speaker 0]: Super. For the record.

[Commissioner Adam Greshin (Department of Finance and Management)]: Adam Gresham, commissioner of finance and management. And, madam chair, thank you for thank you for the introduction. Actually, this is a new committee for me.

[Speaker 0]: It's a new committee for us.

[Commissioner Adam Greshin (Department of Finance and Management)]: Fair enough. Thanks for that opportunity to come in and speak to you. So I thought I would there's four slides here. They're pretty high level, but I think they get at from the budget office we're trying to achieve. And let me start off by saying that in prior testimony and conversations you've had on this budget and this structure, one of the questions, I think, actually, it was representative Sibilia who asked, but one of the questions was what problem are we trying to solve? You know, why are we doing this? Which is fair. So why? There's two issues we're addressing with this. And the first is, as I you know, I think the secretary probably told you that she was here before, she had come to me, gosh, probably a year ago now, I would say, maybe a year or two years ago, and said, you know, I want to create, I want to budget for how I am going to pay. In other words, the way we budget for ADS services is not really in line with how we're operating the agency. Can we change this? And that's what led to long discussions on the creation of what you have seen already, the core enterprise services. Her thought was that that was really kind of how they're operating. They have this core enterprise services. They're offering every agency and department in state government, yet their budget doesn't really reflect that. So she wanted to restructure how they and so we work with them. Part of my job is to work with secretaries and commissioners to make sure that they're budgeting the way they their budgets reflect how they are. So that was really the first thing. Second thing is kind of the other component of my job. And as many of you may know, financial management is really two departments. My kind of the the more visible part of my job is presenting the governor's budget after he presents it himself and advocating for it and defending it, and having, of course, more importantly, helping to develop it. The less visible part of my job, but I would argue the larger component of my job, is to implement the budget once it's passed. When you guys pass the budget, you agree with the Senate, you know, the bill passes, the governor signs it, and it becomes law, it's the job of finance and management, what we call FinOps, financial operations, put it into practice on July 1. So, we spent an awful lot of time doing that and making sure that every penny, and by penny, I mean every single penny that is appropriated gets to where it's supposed to be and not more than that. So that's our job of implementing and overseeing and controlling the budget. Part of that is we come out with what we call the ACT for the annual comprehensive financial report every year. By law, it has to be issued by December 31. We typically issue it the December. And in that ACTFR, among other sections, it's a long document, we review internal service funds, all the internal service funds we have, and by nature, service funds should be in balance, roughly on either side of zero. Some internal service funds are in deficit, and the CIT fund went from three years ago. It had just under a million dollar positive balance. The next year, it had about a $5,000,000 negative balance. The following year, it had a $13,000,000 negative balance. And in the most recently printed annual comprehensive financial report for the fiscal year going by. They have a $25,000,000 negative. Sorry. Question. Yes, sir.

[Rep. Laura Sibilia (Ranking Member)]: Sorry. The CIRP. It's not appearing. I'm right back here. CIT fund. Computer information technology.

[Speaker 0]: Think we need a little one o.

[Commissioner Adam Greshin (Department of Finance and Management)]: That's the We need to direct internal service fund that ADS that ADS uses to perform its functions. That's And I'll actually get into that.

[Rep. Laura Sibilia (Ranking Member)]: Okay. You're gonna tell us

[Commissioner Adam Greshin (Department of Finance and Management)]: about the mechanics of Okay.

[Speaker 0]: Okay.

[Commissioner Adam Greshin (Department of Finance and Management)]: So when an internal service fund runs a deficit, it's our job, not only to point it out, but to figure out a way to prevent that from deteriorating and in the long term make it go away. So when, you know, you have a a internal service fund in a deficit position, and you have the secretary of the agency of digital services asking you to revise how they budget and create new structure for budgeting, you know, that's the why. That's why I'm here today, and that's why you see some differences in what you've seen in past years. So to representative Sibilia's question, what is the CIT fund? Short answer is full of spending authority. And an internal service fund or a department that is funded through an internal service fund includes ADS, but it includes other departments too, like BGS, those general services, DHR, Department of Human Resources. And kind of the short explanation is a lot of state government, think Department of Public Safety or Agency of Human Services, they perform functions for Vermonters. Another part of state government performs functions for those departments that are performing functions for Vermonters. Essentially allow them to do business. They give them a a office or a building where they can hang their hat. They provide, in the case of ADS, a network where we can connect and carry out the stuff we do. They provide the software we need and the like. DHR, across the street, they provide services for our employees. So they're internal. So they're not really serving Vermonters. They're serving the agencies and departments that are servicing Vermonters. They're an internal, just kind of behind the scene operator. And because of that, we don't give them direct appropriations. They do not get direct general fund appropriations. Get their spending authority from other agencies and departments that they serve, which is the nature of an internal service. And that is how ADS gets its spending authority. They get it through four different methodologies, but all of those are put into what becomes the CIT. So there are four components of that pool today. The first is the allocation, and as originally conceived, the allocation, and by allocation, the reason they're called an allocation, because we allocate that out, all those costs out to the agencies and departments. That's kind of their, I call it their overhead. The stuff that they provide statewide, like network availability, like maintaining equipment, like cybersecurity, reliability in network. It used to be they also maintain a lot of our servers and mainframes. Today, most of our servers have migrated to the cloud, but we still have a couple of different costs. Of those costs, because they're for everyone, we allocate those out in the budgets. Each department has a line item for ADS, Internal Service That, in prior years, actually, for fiscal twenty six, amounted to about 13,000,000, a little more than $13,000,000. And, again, we allocated that out according to a user account, according to a formula based on users.

[Rep. Laura Sibilia (Ranking Member)]: Sorry. 13,000,000 is total.

[Commissioner Adam Greshin (Department of Finance and Management)]: That was I don't wanna correct the total allocation in this year's budget. That was amongst all. The other three components that all feed into this pool are based on demand, and the concept there is they're not used by everyone. They're used by specific departments and agencies for specific functions. So instead of, you know, socializing the cost of a system that only serves the Department of Public Safety, we'll charge the Department of Public Safety for that, and they'll pay us back. So there's three different ways they do that. The first, the SLA, which stands for service level agreement, which is I've never for the life of me figured out how they actually got that terminology. But when you think SLA, think kinda digits. Think machines. Think mainframes. Think data storage. That's what it is. And different departments have different levels of these services. Some departments, for example, with with data storage are very happy. You know, think again, DPS with the body cams, and, you know, they have a requirement. They have to store all this video for x number of years. That's kind of expensive. But I my department, finance and management, shouldn't pay for that. Right? I mean, that's a service that they provide, so that's billed directly to them. Now I have to store vision information. That's our statewide accounting system. So if one of you guys comes to me and says, know, in 2005, what did we spend on public safety? I can go back in our system, and I can tell you, you know, that's stored. So, you know, data, there are some departments that still have mainframes. I can't remember which one. I believe human services still has mainframe. I think AOT may also, but that thing. But they're not statewide. So that's the SLA is built based on need for basically technology equipment. When you think of timesheet, which is the next thing, think human beings. And these are the guys and women who were, prior to ADS or prior to, yeah, ADS, they were embedded in departments. So, you know, public safety had a crew of IT people who maintained what they needed to maintain, who were the go to people when you had a problem, who helped set up your software and the like, they're embedded into partners. Well, still are, except that they're drawing their paychecks now from ADS, not from, say, public safety or human services. And ADS, in turn, bills public safety or human services, five sheet billing monthly. So the final one, and there's been a lot of discussion I know in this committee, is what's called bespoke, another kind of funky term. But when you think of bespoke, think of IT projects. Across the state, they're different in different departments. In human services, have the Medicaid Data Warehouse or the integrated eligibility. Be it all, you have unemployment insurance monetization, AOT, you have the DMV modernization, so different projects statewide. And ADS would help to get the contract for those projects, they'd oversee it and so on. They would pay the vendor, and then they would bill back the agency. So that's how they would recover their cost. So all four of these different kind of components of spending authority were cooled in the CIT fund. And that's what, at the end of the day, when ADS looks at their budget, they see $133,000,000 in the CIT fund. That's their budget. That's their amount of spending authority. That's how it works now. And how it'll work in fiscal twenty seven won't be dramatically different from that, but there'll be some changes. And part of that is really the, call it, control nature of the power of work in finance and management to kind of break down what is a large pool of money into smaller components so it's easier to track. And don't think there's anything nefarious in this going on. We're just it's more allowing us at ADS to see kind of how this money is flowing back and forth. Because, you know, if you look at the pool, all of that water mixed together, if it were to turn a weird color, you wanna isolate the source of that. You wanna figure out, alright, so where is that coming from? And it's hard to tell in a big pool where it's coming from. So what we're trying to do is isolate these cost recovery methods allocation, service level agreement, timesheet bespoke into individual components, so we can have a better feel for what's going in, what's going out, and why there's a deficit situation.

[Rep. Laura Sibilia (Ranking Member)]: Rutland, Sibilia? So my progression so what turns what turns the pool honey colors? Like, what are the things that happen that we don't know why they happen? So Or maybe a better question is, how does money get in and out of the pool?

[Commissioner Adam Greshin (Department of Finance and Management)]: So money gets into the pool when Like the house budget is passed. Yeah. And they get spending authority in these different components. And allocation Yeah. We allocate that out statewide. For SLA, they charge each department for services they use. For time sheet, they charge each department for embedded employees at bespoke when they launch a project. So all of that money hit when we pass a budget that you guys are contributing to, it says for ADS, there will be this amount for allocation, this amount for SLA, and so on. All of that goes into this pool here.

[Rep. Laura Sibilia (Ranking Member)]: Right after we pass the budget. The money goes right into the pool.

[Commissioner Adam Greshin (Department of Finance and Management)]: Yeah.

[Rep. R. Scott Campbell (Vice Chair)]: Spending

[Commissioner Adam Greshin (Department of Finance and Management)]: authority does. Yeah.

[Speaker 0]: That was the question I had. I don't think the money doesn't go into the pool. The ability to charge that much.

[Commissioner Adam Greshin (Department of Finance and Management)]: Yes. The spending

[Speaker 0]: authority It's not like we're dumping a bunch of money into a bucket. We're saying I I know this is the wrong way to say it, but here's your credit card, and

[Rep. Laura Sibilia (Ranking Member)]: you have a $20,000 spending limit with ADS or with AHS.

[Commissioner Adam Greshin (Department of Finance and Management)]: We're saying to ADS, here is your total spending limit. We call it spending authority. And the components of it are, you know, the allocations of what we're allocating out. The service level agreement, the SLA, the time sheet that we spoke there, all these different amounts, we're piling them all together. We're putting them in this pool.

[Speaker 0]: And you can't charge more than that. You can't you can't charge the agencies more than PEX, more than Y. Right? There's a there's a cap.

[Commissioner Adam Greshin (Department of Finance and Management)]: Yeah. That there's a cap on their total spending authority.

[Rep. Laura Sibilia (Ranking Member)]: So but all of all the money that so ADS has spending authority, and then when they go when they spend, they have to recover those funds. That's correct. And they go to the agency, present a bill Mhmm. And the agency then pays them. That's correct. And they only can charge as much as their spending authority.

[Commissioner Adam Greshin (Department of Finance and Management)]: That's right. They have x amount of spending authority for that.

[Rep. Laura Sibilia (Ranking Member)]: And are all of the agencies and departments paying them according to the spending authority?

[Commissioner Adam Greshin (Department of Finance and Management)]: They're paying their bills. Yes.

[Rep. Laura Sibilia (Ranking Member)]: Are they all paying them according to the spending authority?

[Commissioner Adam Greshin (Department of Finance and Management)]: Well, they're paying them according to what each bill says. In other words, for my department, you know, we pay a monthly time sheet, which is roughly around $607,100 dollars a month. So, yeah, when we get the bill, we pay.

[Speaker 0]: This is related. So when you say the fund is in deficit, then that's the part I don't get. Is ADS billing out do you mean that ADS is billing out more than its spending authority or that agencies aren't paying? How do you get how does a fund like that get into deficit?

[Commissioner Adam Greshin (Department of Finance and Management)]: So there's a couple of and I say theories because we're researching this now, and that's one reason why the budget is going to change in the future year, how we budget for these things. But keep in mind, as I said earlier, ADS as an internal service fund, it operates based on what's called the cost recovery model. They don't get a direct general fund appropriation. They get all their funding from different agencies and departments for various functions. So at the end of the year, they should be in a totally balanced position. They performed at these services, and they billed for it. What's happening is they are not recovering all their costs for the services they're performing.

[Rep. Laura Sibilia (Ranking Member)]: How come?

[Commissioner Adam Greshin (Department of Finance and Management)]: Why not? So, again, this is we're still speculating, but we're reasonably certain that there are a couple of things that are leading to it. Some of what they do is not recoverable. They're calling nonrecoverable. Now what does that mean? Remember when I said allocation is billed statewide. Every department has a line item in their budget for their ADS allocation. That's what everyone pays for because those are services that everyone uses. Some services that ADS is performing are not billable statewide because they're not necessarily recoverable. So for example, they're doing some work in artificial intelligence. When they're billing what they're performing statewide, they're billing out to agencies. The agencies are having their budgets amounts to pay for that. But in particular, think about this, the Agency of Human Services receives, I know what percentage, probably about between a third to 40% of their budget is federal money. By far, the largest single program they run is Medicaid. Medicaid has a lot of strings attached. They'll pay for this, they can pay for that. So when the agency of human services receives a bill, or as part of their allocation, it includes artificial intelligence, data governance and management, project

[Rep. R. Scott Campbell (Vice Chair)]: management,

[Commissioner Adam Greshin (Department of Finance and Management)]: Medicaid's not necessarily gonna pay for that. And so what the Agency of Human Services is saying is we can't bill our federal partners for that. We're just gonna have to either not pay for it or pay for it with general fund. And so some of these services that are currently being performed by ADS, they're not billing out. They're not part of their allocation. Not to say they're bad services, that's not my point, but they can't bill them out as they should. So they're forming them, but they're not recovering those costs. That's the first thing. The second thing, which I think received more conversation, was within timesheet. There's a question about whether their timesheet billing amounts are enough to recoup the cost of the humans, remember, humans who make a timesheet, whether their hourly billing amounts are enough to cover their costs. There's been some debate about whether those hourly rates are too low to cover the costs or not. That's one second possibility.

[Rep. R. Scott Campbell (Vice Chair)]: Rep Campbell. Okay, so that's interesting, but I wanted to go back to the pool and these various items that are in the pool. I would imagine that each item and items under each of these items would have a budget line. So I get that. I'm wondering how that is not a way to to to to to keep those budget lines, expenditures accounted for.

[Commissioner Adam Greshin (Department of Finance and Management)]: So the budget line is their total spending of the organization. It doesn't really say how they're going to recover the cost. There's the thought that if they have, say, $30,000,000 of time sheet spending authority, that they'll have $30,000,000 of expenditures and recover $30,000,000 of

[Rep. R. Scott Campbell (Vice Chair)]: Well, right now, it's what I'm asking. We're asking in allocation, let's say, they have every agency and department and state government, and this is how they come up with a number for the allocation part of the CIT fund. For every agency and department, do they not have a number associated to that agency or department for how much they expect to spend with that agency or department? They do. They do. Each agency and department has a line item in their budget,

[Commissioner Adam Greshin (Department of Finance and Management)]: or several line items, really. Mean, Timesheet, SLA, the allocation, all of that is part of each agency and department's budget.

[Rep. R. Scott Campbell (Vice Chair)]: So I guess what I'm missing is, how is that not if if that's how it's structured, which is how how it's gotta be structured, how is that how how are we not agencies and departments accountable for the for that spending?

[Commissioner Adam Greshin (Department of Finance and Management)]: What we are. In other words, when they receive a bill, they pay. There's very little history for departments and agencies not paying their bills. Right. My point is that some of the functions and the first point I made, some of the functions that are being carried out by ABS are not sent out as part of a bill, and they're not paid for through the allocation methodology. So those are costs that are not being recovered and

[Rep. R. Scott Campbell (Vice Chair)]: are adding to a deficit in their return for this month. Yeah. No. I I I'm I'm I'm following you there. I guess I'm just and you haven't gotten to the to what the new system will be, but I'm trying to understand why the old system is broke. Well, because if we have a line item for each agency department for each of these items in the CIT fund, then we do have a way of cracking not only what they're actually spending, but also what what we're budgeting for that spend.

[Commissioner Adam Greshin (Department of Finance and Management)]: It's hard to track when you have a big pool of money from a a control standpoint. This pool is we all of these sources are pulled together. Yeah. So it makes it very challenging to track what spending is going on where and what's leading to we're we're it's more than speculation. You know? We're reasonably certain we know, and a d think we've worked with ADS, enough to know that there are certain functions that they're performing, that they're not recovering. We know that. And we're less certain with timesheet about the amount that should be billed, because there are a number of questions that we have and they have in that regard, and we're currently discussing it. But when you have, I mean, kind of control 101 is it's very hard to have a large pool of money to figure out what's going in and what's going out. So what we're trying to do is compartmentalize that, and then we can look, you know, in, you know, much more detail. Right.

[Rep. R. Scott Campbell (Vice Chair)]: Well, maybe I'll wait until you get to your what the new system is and then compare and contrast. Thank you.

[Rep. Michael "Mike" Southworth (Member)]: So last year, we heard a lot about billing and billing cycles where ADS was billing for services that were done, but they wouldn't be able to bill until after

[Rep. R. Scott Campbell (Vice Chair)]: the I think it was a fiscal year.

[Rep. Michael "Mike" Southworth (Member)]: I'm trying to remember exactly stuff that took Yeah. Testimony on. And we ended up providing, I believe, was 15,000,000 to ADS to get away from that process. Has that worked, or is that still contributing to the deficit? Let's

[Commissioner Adam Greshin (Department of Finance and Management)]: And I will answer that. The answer is yes. It it was a good act. We we needed to do that. And for a reason that has to do with the creation of what's called the core enterprise services, I mean, one of the the contributing factors in the creation of core enterprise service for secretary Riley Hughes was that the allocation amount, which was supposed to be kind of the cost of overhead and the services that everyone was receiving, really didn't reflect the true cost of delivering the services that everyone was receiving. It was too small. So some of what was the cost of, say, providing a network and maintaining the mainframes and servers and even making sure data was safe, some of that is included in the allocation, but some of it was, for example, artificial intelligence or data governance or some project management, domain services and stuff like that. So the core enterprise services is going to include all of that, meaning it's going to the allocation the amount we allocate out to the ones is going to grow. But part of the challenge there was we build service level SLA in arrears.

[Rep. R. Scott Campbell (Vice Chair)]: But so,

[Commissioner Adam Greshin (Department of Finance and Management)]: for example, the SLA, the departments pay this year in fiscal twenty six, were for services they received last year in fiscal twenty five. And, you know, the reason for that was, I guess, reasonably straightforward. You don't know how much service you're gonna use until the end of year. You need to tally it up and then rebuild. Well, part of this new model will incorporate some of the SLA services into the core enterprise services that's going to be allocated out to departments. So in fiscal twenty seven, departments are going to be paying last year's SLA bill, and partly some of those services are gonna be incorporated in this year's core enterprise services bill. It could be a double bill. And so that $15,000,000 was meant to offset the pain of kinda charging departments twice, once for last year's services and once for this year's services. That was what the intent of that $15,000,000 was, and it has worked. By that, I mean, it's helped offset the double billing issue, and it's helped offset the pain that departments otherwise would have to have come up with last year's bill plus part of this year's bill. So yes, it was a good idea.

[Rep. Michael "Mike" Southworth (Member)]: And we're still feeling effects of that in this deficit that we're talking about now or no? No.

[Commissioner Adam Greshin (Department of Finance and Management)]: That was unrelated to. Alright. Thank you. You're welcome. So in this year's rendition, a few things have changed. That big pool of CIT money, you know, I wanted to show a smaller pool, and I couldn't find anywhere. And I or something that was a kind of a club ground pool. So this is more like a hot tub. It's that's really not fair. Is you know, core enterprise services is larger than a hot tub, but smaller than an in ground pool. So, anyway, what we did is we broke up that large $133,000,000 pool into smaller components, which will make it much, I think, more transparent and clear where the money is coming from and where it's going. The the CIT fund, which was what we spoke about before, will be $35,700,000. That means we're going to bill that out to departments and agencies. You know, they're billed by a formula based on user accounts. That's still going to be billed out as it was in past years. But what's new this year, and this gets to the fact that we had some unrecoverable expenses that were leading to a deficit internal service line. What's new this year is we're going to give them a $9,000,000 direct appropriation. That's new. And that essentially acknowledges the fact that some of the services they're performing may be necessary services, but we can't allocate them out to every department, because some departments have funding sources that won't pay them for that. So we're giving them straight general fund. And that would include predominantly data governance and management, which will be a large part of that, artificial intelligence, some project management costs, some domain services like remod.gov, but services that, you know, the ADS believes are necessary to deliver a product of statewide digital services, but not readily allocable to agencies and departments statewide. So we're just giving them a direct general fund component. And that will not only, I think, make it easier for agencies and departments, they won't have to figure out whether they can actually bill their partners if part of their funding source is federal. But it also, you know, I think make it easier for the agency of digital services to know that these functions will be directly paid for with general fund. So that's a change. You know, internal service funds don't get direct appropriations. Here, we're acknowledging that some of their functions are really not easily recovered from billing out to agencies, departments, so we're gonna give them a direct appropriation, which will be about 10% of their total appropriation, about $9,000,000. That's different. That 9,000,000 and the 35,700,000.0 will combine to roughly the $4,546,000,000 dollars of core enterprise services. If anyone comes to ask you, what's it cost to run a statewide IT program? That's a pretty good answer. That's what it was. Now there are other things, but like the SLA and timesheet and and bespoke, which are down below. But the kind of the the cost of just statewide IT, maintaining all the stuff that we need to maintain at a twenty first century presence in state government, That's gonna be included in core enterprise services, $45,000,000. What you see below sorry. Sorry.

[Rep. R. Scott Campbell (Vice Chair)]: I guess I'm trying to understand what makes up the $35,000,000 now. I guess it's what we used to call allocations and timesheet, more or less. Is that So I brought and and this these are really ADS questions, but I

[Commissioner Adam Greshin (Department of Finance and Management)]: brought along a cheat sheet Just so you know, I'm I'm no IT expert. But what will make up the the CIT fund and the that we will allocate out will be stuff like service desk support, enterprise product support, foundational security, enterprise architecture, finance and admin, for example, the people who came in to present to you before, the secretary of business office and so on, The enterprise project management that will predominantly be general fund, testing, vulnerability assessment, Internet, and other network connectivity. So, you know, these, think, that in their presentation they cover for you, but that that will be, I would argue, the cost of doing a statewide IT business, kind of core. Well, it's kinda related to

[Rep. R. Scott Campbell (Vice Chair)]: the f y twenty six system, the previous system, which you went into in some detail. We gave this a number for allocation, $13,000,000, but you didn't detail the other SLA time sheet as and disposed. But I guess I'm trying to I'm trying to relate to So the alley five minute note. It still seems like a pretty

[Commissioner Adam Greshin (Department of Finance and Management)]: big number for of, like, you know, for a pool. It is. Yeah. It it and like I said, I if I had something better than a hot tub, I would have put it up there. But it is. And part of what we're saying, either explicitly or implicitly, is the allocation amount, the amount that we allocated out that was supposed to be back in the day for running a statewide IT program was just too small. It wasn't enough to do the services that ADS believed they needed to do. So it covered many of these, though not all of these. Some of these that I just mentioned were not recovered, which led to deficit. They weren't billing out to agencies and departments, so that was leading to a deficit. So essentially, what we're doing is we're saying, look, services are happening. We can't will them away. They need to happen. So let's cover them, and let's pony up for it. That's essentially why the core enterprise services, the CIT fund allocation has grown. I mean, it's it's about triple the size. Yeah. Not quite two and a half cent times.

[Rep. Laura Sibilia (Ranking Member)]: Yeah. Right. Okay. What's your questions? The so I'm struggling with all of this, although it's getting a little clearer. Thank you. The slide for prior to this one. It would be helpful to have so what I wanna do is compare this slide to the subsequent slide in terms of dollar amounts. Do we have the dollar amounts for the allocation SLA timesheet for smoke? Is that something that we could break out like it is And I don't know if it's apple to apple with the second slide because it's not labeled allocation SLA time sheet. Well, they changed the names.

[Commissioner Adam Greshin (Department of Finance and Management)]: So I'm going with the names that the new names. But, yes, I can I can have them? Right?

[Rep. Laura Sibilia (Ranking Member)]: It would be it would just for us mere mortals it would be really helpful if we could get a little bit closer to an apples to apples that might speed I our top of

[Commissioner Adam Greshin (Department of Finance and Management)]: can do that. The other change on the third slide that's up there now is that the professional resourcing, that's the old timesheet. And again, think humans. The enterprise offerings, that was formerly SLA. That amount has shrunk substantially. That was $2,530,000,000 dollars. It is now $11,700,000. And part of the reason is, again, some of these services that were formerly built out based on demand, the agency of digital services believe they're not really based on demand. They're being provided to everyone. So let's just part be part of the core, the cost of doing business. Probably the best example of that is the Microsoft suite of products we have on our you know, everyone in state government has that suite. It's in fact, some people in state government have a smaller suite. Think cloud drivers or, I don't know, maintenance people. They have access to Microsoft products, but they're not what I would call kind of desktop users. So actually, in our billing amounts within core, we've accounted for that. So AOT will receive a certain percentage less because they have some employees. DOC corrections is another good example of that. You know, some of the correctional officers may or may not be intensive users of Microsoft products. So in our allocation formula, we count that. But that's formally the the enterprise offering fund is formerly SLA, and that used to be much larger because that included billings for many not all, but many software products that are used statewide. Microsoft's the best example. Now we will still bill out if I have, for example, in my office, we have some software products that help us actually produce the annual budget and the annual comprehensive financial report. All agencies and departments shouldn't pay for that. That should be my expense. So that will still come through the enterprise offering on the SLA. We'll still get a a bill for that at the end of the year, but it will be for everyone.

[Rep. Laura Sibilia (Ranking Member)]: So, again, trying to make this comparison by just looking at totals, it looks like the total from '26 to '27 is about 45,000,000 less.

[Rep. R. Scott Campbell (Vice Chair)]: That's right.

[Rep. Laura Sibilia (Ranking Member)]: Say that again. 45,000,000 or less.

[Commissioner Adam Greshin (Department of Finance and Management)]: I'm getting to that.

[Rep. Laura Sibilia (Ranking Member)]: I just can't wait. Getting to that.

[Rep. R. Scott Campbell (Vice Chair)]: So can I just because I I think I understand, but I wanna make sure that I that that's clear on it? So the enterprise services fund is is like SLA, but different in that it's not based services that everybody uses. It's it's based services that most departments use. Is that

[Commissioner Adam Greshin (Department of Finance and Management)]: is that right? It's based services that individual department here's a good example. Like I said, I'm not sure exactly where all the mainframes are, but there are three or four grounds that government human services, know, has a mainframe. So they're charged for the maintenance of that, but I'm not charged for that in my department because they don't have it made. So it would be that type of thing. If I have a specific software product that I use intensively but no one else uses because their work doesn't require it, I'm charged for that. Right. So substantially, I think the largest single part of the enterprise offerings fund will be for data storage, cloud services, data that we store in the cloud. That will, I think, make up the largest single component. That would, again, be a good question to ask the ADS, but I think that's the single largest component, It's different departments have different storage needs, and those are billed out per they're easy to measure, they're easy to charge for, so that's predominantly what SLA for now.

[Rep. R. Scott Campbell (Vice Chair)]: Services. I think you said that was in core. I'm sorry to interrupt, but I think you said that was in core enterprise services. No. It sounds like No, it's not.

[Commissioner Adam Greshin (Department of Finance and Management)]: It's an enterprise offering. So core enterprise serving data I mean, it's a data governance and management. That's not data storage. That's different. Okay.

[Rep. Laura Sibilia (Ranking Member)]: The one to one is from the SLA in 2026 to the enterprise offerings in 2027?

[Commissioner Adam Greshin (Department of Finance and Management)]: Yeah. That number has changed substantially.

[Rep. Laura Sibilia (Ranking Member)]: But what they're what they're for is the same.

[Commissioner Adam Greshin (Department of Finance and Management)]: Yeah. Same thing. Yeah. Okay. Good. And then the final and and keep in mind, each of these now is gonna have its own fund. So we'll be able to track what we spend, the spending authority and the recovery amounts by fund. And that's much easier than it is now because these will be isolated. And we'll be able to see, well, you know, if we're running a deficit in the professional resourcing fund, which used to be timesheet, we'll know it, and we'll see it, and we'll know, that's part of the problem, and we'll be able to kind of focus on it and see why. So this is, again, much easier to look at and track. The final component here, to your question earlier, is really happy. Customized services fund, that's the old bespoke, and bespoke last year in FY '26 was $47,500,000. This year, in the ADS budget, it is $5,000,000.

[Speaker 0]: What was the last term? Sorry, I missed 40.

[Commissioner Adam Greshin (Department of Finance and Management)]: I think it was $47.5 year, it's quite a bit less, and that does not mean that there are no projects out there this year. This year, the spending authority that ADS will have will be $5,000,000, and that will substantially be for hardware and software and the like. That's part of bespoke. So when my department you know, if my laptop blows up and I need a new laptop, AES you know, we contact AES. We fill out a form, what kind of laptop we need. They go out and buy it. They give it to us. They send us a note. That will still happen. But for many in fact, most of the projects that ADS had spending authority for, it was also spending authority in the various agencies, the departments that were sponsoring those projects. That spending authority will less will rest solely with the departments and agencies that have those projects. Okay? Question. Okay.

[Rep. Laura Sibilia (Ranking Member)]: Can I So I think I just heard you say there was dual spending authority for those projects, like 50,000,000 and 50,000,000, like, spending authority? That's correct.

[Speaker 0]: That's how it was.

[Commissioner Adam Greshin (Department of Finance and Management)]: Yes. That is how it is. How it was. Was. How it will be this year is the spending authority will rest with the agency or department that has the project. So

[Speaker 0]: I do have questions about that. So I'm gonna dive in now. So I know it's not gonna be how it is, but how did it work when there was dual spending authority? Because it sounds to me like we've heard in, you know, we're talking to ADS and now I'm talking to you. We had heard ADS say that, you know, that that you guys thought they had excess spending authority. Now I'm hearing dual spending authority. So I'm trying to understand how it used to work, and it sounds like you thought that that it wasn't working. So that I'm that's what I'm trying to get at. And also to kinda segue from there into, like, you know, I'm hearing you talk about financial control, financial oversight. So I'm wondering if there's if we're fixing some sort of standard, you know, that wasn't being adhered to, not suggesting no one's suggesting anything nefarious. It just sounds like to me that these moves are based on some spending authority that you you didn't agree with or that weren't wasn't working or maybe a desire for financial oversight and control that you thought wasn't working. So that I'm trying to get into all that.

[Rep. R. Scott Campbell (Vice Chair)]: Right. Yeah. So

[Commissioner Adam Greshin (Department of Finance and Management)]: the difference between the bespoke spending authority and the spending authority from allocation or enterprise services, SLA, and time sheet. The difference there is with bespoke, the likelihood of all that spending authority being needed is practically zero. Think about an IT project, a $20,000,000 IT project. Are they gonna use all the $20,000,000 of that the year they get it? In the perfect world, yeah, they start the project. They'd be finished in a year. Done. But in the real world, that doesn't happen. So by nature of IT projects, you inevitably will have excess spending authority in any one year. Eventually, that money will be spent, but it won't necessarily be spent in the same year. So the difference there's a difference between that and the SLA or the time sheet or the Allergan spending authority. That was predominantly, if not entirely being used. Bespoke was different in that regard already, in that, yes, it had excess spending authority, but, you know, that was not nefarious. That was just the nature of how projects work. So, yeah, there was excess spending authority. So one of our concepts was, remember that big pool? We thought we've gotta reduce the size of that pool and see what's in there and make it more transparent. So that's one way to do it, by reducing spending authority in one particular category. It was kind of distinct from the others to begin with and leaving it with the agency or department that was sponsoring the project so the project could still happen, but taking it out of the poop.

[Unidentified Committee Member]: Yeah. So, you know, part of the whole genesis of ADS was try to rationalize IT across state government. Right? And slowly over the years, that's been happening. And so my concern is with if you're if your ADS will lose visibility and strategic management of projects as they get budgeted out to the various agencies instead of being looked at holistically from the ADS point

[Commissioner Adam Greshin (Department of Finance and Management)]: of view to

[Unidentified Committee Member]: understand clearly and in a timely manner what's going on across IT and state government. So they lose strategic visibility and potentially cost control and understanding what's going on. And then there's also a reporting issue. You know, we worked closely with them last session on developing a good reporting mechanism. If they're not getting all that stuff from the various agencies, then they can't see it. We can't see it in a timely manner, and then we can't do our oversight functions. So can you speak to those various issues? Happy to.

[Rep. R. Scott Campbell (Vice Chair)]: The way it works now

[Commissioner Adam Greshin (Department of Finance and Management)]: is when a project is meet, departments fill out what we call an IT ABC form. I mean, have you seen those? Yes. And ADS reviews those. I believe, by the way, they're changing those now. But well, I mean, they're just updating. You know? But so departments fill that out. ADS discusses it, talks with them about what they need, maybe shaves this, adds that. I mean, they they put their expertise at work because most departments know what they want, but they they don't know much about a you know, getting them. So once the IT ABC form is filled out and agreed and all the signatures are on there, ADS goes out and finds vendors, asks for bids, decides on, you know, a bid, buys or, you know, reserves the product and works to get it implemented. And all of that won't change a bit. Nothing. When it comes time to pay the vendor, maybe vendors are paid quarterly, whatever, ADS pays the vendor. Then they send a bill to the sponsoring agency or department, and that agency or department, with their spending authority, pays ADS. The big change, the only change, is instead of ADS paying the vendor, they're still gonna contact the department, and they're going to say, this vendor has provided these services. Everything's right. Pay them. And the agency department will pay them. That's the only change. We're not taking away oversight. We're not, you know, abolishing the need for IT, ABC, or whatever else that succeeds that. We're not asking them to send the contracts to the to the the, you know, sponsoring agency. We don't wanna change any of that. All that we're asking is instead of paying the bill, contact the sponsoring agency, ask them to pay the bill. That's fine. And it's I think ADS is worried without that spending authority, they won't be able to track the spending. And, you know, I'm here to say we will make sure that's not the case. You know, you have my word that we will make sure that's not the case. We will work with these folks. You know, we're in this together. We're gonna work to make sure that they have the information at their fingertips, and they'll be able to track the the data that you need.

[Rep. Laura Sibilia (Ranking Member)]: So, Robert, Southworth, then Sibilia, I think.

[Rep. Michael "Mike" Southworth (Member)]: So the line item that shows the 5,000,000 with the savings of 45,000,000, I believe it was, You're basically just transferring deferring the spending authority from ADS to each individual department or agency that's gonna be

[Commissioner Adam Greshin (Department of Finance and Management)]: doing it. Right. They already had the spending. This was duplicate spending. Remember, when ADS pays the bill, they need spending authority to do that. When they bill my department for a project they did for me, I need spending authority to pay ADS. So, you know, that already existed. So what we're doing is we're removing it from ADS. We're leaving it in the department that has it. Instead of duplicate spending authority, on and And the $5,000,000 is an acknowledgment that some things that would be ridiculous. Like if I had every time I wanted to buy a laptop or upgrade a docking station, whatever, I had to go out and do that myself and figure out what to get. So I'm that that would be silly. So ADS is still going to do that statewide. You know, they they've done that for a while. They know what they're doing. But other projects, IT projects, spending its writing with

[Rep. Laura Sibilia (Ranking Member)]: the agency. Marketing is very dumb and sick. That's right. Thank you. So yeah. And still, why not remove the spending authority from the agency?

[Commissioner Adam Greshin (Department of Finance and Management)]: Because that would still leave a fairly large pool of assets that would blend into the other pools of assets and make it more difficult to compartmentalize the streams of money going in and out of

[Rep. Laura Sibilia (Ranking Member)]: AGS. I'm gonna need that again.

[Rep. R. Scott Campbell (Vice Chair)]: I'm not sure.

[Unidentified Committee Member]: The swimming pool.

[Rep. Laura Sibilia (Ranking Member)]: Yeah. So That's alright.

[Commissioner Adam Greshin (Department of Finance and Management)]: That would enlarge that pool to a size that we think is not necessary and make it more difficult to track the movement of money into and out of it. So why not make the pool smaller and isolate the streams? That's, I think, really all worth the same.

[Rep. Laura Sibilia (Ranking Member)]: Laura Sibilia? I'm curious how the BAA would be different in the future. Like, we saw the effective chargebacks in the last last year.

[Commissioner Adam Greshin (Department of Finance and Management)]: Yeah.

[Rep. Laura Sibilia (Ranking Member)]: I haven't I don't remember what I saw this year. But because of these changes, would the would it be more localized to the agency level? We would see where there may have been more spending than anticipated for a different recruitment or an agency on a project.

[Commissioner Adam Greshin (Department of Finance and Management)]: Yeah. The BAA last year was substantially because of service level, you can see SLA bills, and those are charges for products that are used by the agencies, were higher than the initial estimates. So at the beginning of the year, ADS estimates what departments will need Mhmm. For various software and services that they will be billed for. You know, it's in a sense, it's almost a fool's errand. It's very hard to to make those estimates. And, usually, they're in the ballpark. Last year, it came out, and that could be for any number of reasons. That could be because departments use more than they originally thought they would. It could be because the price of some of these services have gone up. I mean, there's a number of reasons for that. But at the end of the when the bills arrived, they were quite a bit higher than what departments had anticipated. And so they didn't have budgets for it. So and EAA. That's why that was.

[Speaker 0]: I have a question I don't wanna forget, and then I know these guys have questions, and I'm sorry we're running late. Should have allowed more time. So across all of the different funds that are being, you know, broken out into new funds and stuff, if do you know whether apples to oranges last year to this year spending on this overall across all funds is up or down? What's the bottom line? I'm I'm I'm getting a handle on how we're moving this to there and this to there. But across everything is how much is spending up for all this stuff? Do you know?

[Commissioner Adam Greshin (Department of Finance and Management)]: I do. Oh. That I can you know, I'm kinda weak when it comes to the workings of ADS, but when it comes to the budgeting, that's part of my job. So in the general fund overview that we presented to the House Appropriations Committee, we made really, there are three different points that we made among the elderly. The first is, as you'll recall, what's new this year in their budget is this direct general fund appropriation. That's Bram They used to get a very small amount of general fund, call it $230,000, which was a very specific GIS project that they, every year, didn't. But they never I mean, that was insignificant. This year, they're getting another $9,000,000 on top of that. That is an up of $9,000,000 in general. In addition, the core enterprise services remember last year I told you that this allocation was 13, I think, $300,000, and this year, the total is going to be $45,000,000. Part of that 45 is direct general fund, but the other part is 35,700,000.0. So 13.3 is going to 35.7. Now that's not all general fund, but the general fund component of that will be up about a $100,000,000. So you have a $9,000,000 increase in direct general fund appropriation. You have about a $10,000,000 increase in the allocation, the general fund component and the allocation. But you also have about a $6,000,000 decrease in the SLA. Remember, some of those SLA services are being poured into the or they're being subsumed by the 400 process. Remember, can see examples of Microsoft software. So the net of it is about a 14,000,000 general fund increase. And, you know, that we spoke to the appropriations committees about. We explained that part of that is putting what are costs that were not being recovered into the budget and, you know, essentially being transparent about it and saying, look. You know, these are costs that are not are being performed, but they're not being recovered, and they're leading to a deficit in the internal service fund. So, you know, we're just coming around and saying, look. You know, this we need to to make sure we incorporate. So that's probably the lion's share of it.

[Rep. R. Scott Campbell (Vice Chair)]: Okay. For Chittenden, what you just said was $9,000,000 in, that was. Was General General I'm sorry. $99,000,000 in the core enterprise services that you mentioned before. And and and then you also said CIT is gonna result in a $10,000,000 increase General fund. In the general fund. Yeah. So that's 19. Right? That's correct. Okay. I thought you said 14.

[Commissioner Adam Greshin (Department of Finance and Management)]: But keep in mind, there's going to be a down an offset down in the what was the service level agreement that's currently called enterprise offerings. So there's going to be a net down for the service level agreement because some of those billings are going to be now included in the core enterprise services, and instead of being billed separately to each department, they're going to be socialized and part of the quarter. It's what everyone receives.

[Rep. R. Scott Campbell (Vice Chair)]: Too much for me, but anyway, another question I have is about the $5,000,000 allocated to the Customized Services Fund, and the functions listed under that that ATS will be have laying or negotiating with the vendors, contracting with the vendors, providing oversight, and determining the payment. Sounds like that's could easily take 1 to $5 worth of time for ADS just to do those things. Is that is that or is that what's conceived of as being paid for by that $5,000,000?

[Commissioner Adam Greshin (Department of Finance and Management)]: The $5,000,000 is, yeah, that would help pay for their services, but predominantly that's hardware and software, predominantly.

[Rep. R. Scott Campbell (Vice Chair)]: All of those functions, managing contracts, managing vendors, soliciting bids, that whole process is pretty time intensive. That will be part of

[Commissioner Adam Greshin (Department of Finance and Management)]: their core enterprise services function,

[Rep. R. Scott Campbell (Vice Chair)]: core enterprise services. I mean, that's part

[Commissioner Adam Greshin (Department of Finance and Management)]: of what they do, that they deliver that statewide.

[Rep. R. Scott Campbell (Vice Chair)]: Did you agree? I need one more question. Sorry, I'm not gonna let it get bad, but my last quirk go ahead. What?

[Commissioner Adam Greshin (Department of Finance and Management)]: Part of the core enterprise services is what's called EPMO, enterprise project management. I mean, they're helping to manage projects on a statewide basis. That's what they do.

[Rep. R. Scott Campbell (Vice Chair)]: Yeah. But I guess I would assume that's the kind of I'm imagining from what you described. The core enterprise services is what everybody is sharing. So in terms services and equipment everybody has to have, as opposed to enterprise offerings funds professional resourcing fund, quality time sheet, those are more specific to each department or agency.

[Commissioner Adam Greshin (Department of Finance and Management)]: The projects are, but project offices work on all those projects.

[Rep. R. Scott Campbell (Vice Chair)]: Well, let me ask you about the right path. Having formerly served on transportation, the transportation budget was of course, they have a lot of projects that are multimillion dollar projects that spanned over the years. There any way to relate this concept that you're talking about now with that or with other how other departments manage budgets over for the multiple years? I'm thinking about now with the the calls of bespoke projects. Now the basically, the projects that each department of agency might undertake that cost tens of millions of dollars and span over many years of strength. I mean, in many ways, it's not

[Commissioner Adam Greshin (Department of Finance and Management)]: a shovel in the ground, but it is an IT project, and many of those span five, six, seven, ten years more. It it it's the but, yes, it's a similar concept in that you set aside funding for that. Yeah. And then it is drawn down over a series of years.

[Rep. R. Scott Campbell (Vice Chair)]: Yeah. And I guess I'm at what I'm asking is that in that like a situation? Yeah. Yeah. I think that's fair.

[Speaker 0]: So I wanna do a time check because we're running way late. We have our next scheduled witness who's joining us remotely, so we want to stick to that as 03:30. And between now and then, we need to also hear from JFO. And we need to have a committee discussion and vote on h five twenty seven. So

[Rep. R. Scott Campbell (Vice Chair)]: I'm gonna

[Unidentified Committee Member]: check for the record. Fiscal office.

[Commissioner Adam Greshin (Department of Finance and Management)]: Yeah. I'm due back in house preparations at 02:15. And I did wanna flag also that commissioner Gresham has covered much of what I would have hoped to cover with you all today as well.

[Speaker 0]: Okay.

[Commissioner Adam Greshin (Department of Finance and Management)]: I didn't plan that. Yeah. No. That that's that's fine. So I'm happy to talk to the community offline to figure out where follow-up from Jay's level would be helpful if you all need additional information regarding fiscal on on what mission regression has discussed today.

[Speaker 0]: That sounds like a plan, or we could find a time to just plug in. I know you're down

[Rep. Laura Sibilia (Ranking Member)]: in probes a lot, but I'm actually Yeah. Yeah. Madam chair, I just have I have several questions if I might.

[Speaker 0]: I was more worried about JFO. So and it was good reason as it turns out because we've now blown through your time here. So I apologize for that. So we will get you we'll either circle back with specific questions or get you on the agenda. Our budget letter isn't due until a week from Friday. I'm just trying to make sure that we allow plenty of time to talk about the EDS budget because as you can tell, we have a lot of questions. So apologies. And commissioner, you don't

[Rep. Laura Sibilia (Ranking Member)]: have to go, do you?

[Commissioner Adam Greshin (Department of Finance and Management)]: I'm nervous. I'm nervous until the end Okay. Of time,

[Speaker 0]: Careful. So alright. So so where were we? Yeah.

[Rep. Laura Sibilia (Ranking Member)]: Okay. So let's just see if I have some things here. So the core enterprise services are the allocations previous allocations, and ADS was providing more services than they had spending authority for. That's correct. And so now we are not pulling back those services. We are adding a general bond appropriation to ensure

[Commissioner Adam Greshin (Department of Finance and Management)]: For a lot of. I mean, it's not one to one, but yes, for a lot of that, we are adding general

[Rep. Laura Sibilia (Ranking Member)]: So generally, that's what we're doing there.

[Commissioner Adam Greshin (Department of Finance and Management)]: That's correct. The

[Rep. Laura Sibilia (Ranking Member)]: professional resourcing is the old timesheet. That's correct. The enterprise offerings is data storage ish.

[Commissioner Adam Greshin (Department of Finance and Management)]: Yeah. That's the old SLA, but, yes, it's predominantly data hosting. A couple of mainframes thrown in there, but it's just Right.

[Rep. Laura Sibilia (Ranking Member)]: And that customized services fund are the IT projects themselves. Okay. And so I think I just

[Commissioner Adam Greshin (Department of Finance and Management)]: so let's go. And you

[Rep. Laura Sibilia (Ranking Member)]: have said that you can get us some apples to apples comparisons from last year to this year on those line items. I think I just heard you talk about the project offices, that these costs are now gonna live with the project offices?

[Commissioner Adam Greshin (Department of Finance and Management)]: No. The the costs of these projects will be in the agencies and departments. They will have the spending authority. But what I mentioned is, you know, when the question was, well, ADS entails some costs to help them. You know, I mentioned that they have a, you know, a project office that is intended to do just that. And that's part of their core enterprise services, you know, what they call, I believe, EPMO essentials. Interestingly enough, that will be truly general funding. That's part of the general.

[Rep. Laura Sibilia (Ranking Member)]: Okay. And so these IT projects, which we have wanted well, we know it's our job to provide oversight across these IT projects to the extent that we're able to, which would include, you know, making sure that we understand the time, the budgets are, etcetera. If they're moving into the individual agencies and departments, that feels like that's gonna be challenging. Like, who's who's actually overseeing timeliness in spending and all of that if these decisions are moving back into the agencies? EDS.

[Rep. R. Scott Campbell (Vice Chair)]: Okay.

[Rep. Laura Sibilia (Ranking Member)]: I have another question, madam chair. So

[Speaker 0]: Is it on the same topic? It's not. Okay.

[Rep. Laura Sibilia (Ranking Member)]: I can put have my finger on. I've got my finger on it. Go ahead.

[Speaker 0]: Okay. Because you sure? Yeah. Okay. Because this is I I wanted to ask about this too, and I I think the reason you're see us you're seeing us have so many questions about this is the amount of work that we did last year to try to increase the legislature and just regular Vermonters' ability to track spending, to see when projects were on time and on budget. And so we took a ton of testimony on the ADS annual report, and we focused quite a lot on their EPO dashboard. And we ask them to improve it. And it's become a, you know, a more useful tool. It's a great tool. It's easy to see at a glance. You know, all the big ticket IT projects that are under EPO management and, you know, how the costs are running and whether they're tracking on time. So I I think that our concern was that when we first heard about these changes this year from EDS, Secretary Riley Hughes had said that their concern is that they won't have visibility, they won't be able to see the spending, it's not going to be timely, report back of data. They've been updating the EPO dashboard weekly, I think. And so that's I think that's what Rep. Sibilia was talking about. That's what, you know, we spent so much time last year trying to make progress on. And so I'm curious about how all the spending is coded. Right? Like, is is there a across all these state departments and agencies, is it gonna be a laborious time intensive project for ADS to request the info and the info to come back? Or is it gonna be like a query button that you press on? And I know you said we'll work together, but

[Rep. Laura Sibilia (Ranking Member)]: I I think that's why we're so curious about this is because of the progress that we made, you know, working collaboratively with ABS last year. So, madam chair, I I can tell you that that's why we have chart things.

[Commissioner Adam Greshin (Department of Finance and Management)]: Why we have

[Speaker 0]: chart accounts? Yeah.

[Commissioner Adam Greshin (Department of Finance and Management)]: I mean, that's I mean, this will be tracker. And whether we haven't yet worked out how we'll incorporate this information into something that will be easily retrievable, not just by us, but by ADS, or frankly, else who wants to see it. But, you know, that's what we'll do with chartfields within our vision system. You know, we'll make sure that we have these projects correctly accounted for and coded so that they're easily retrievable by whomever. And that, I think, will require some work, both on their part and our part, to make sure that a query, if you query within vision or statewide accounting system, just for argument's sake, project, you should be able to bring them all up. Now that sounds very simplistic. But once you decide what all the projects are and make sure they're set up correctly with the correct chartfields, you should be able to do that. Like I said, I mean, this is something that we are working on. But we the reason I can say that is because actually yesterday, we had a reasonably long conversation on precisely this topic with our financial operations guys. So we we can get that. But there should be no reason, number one, that the tracking in terms of spending and the like can't be tracked just as it is now.

[Rep. Laura Sibilia (Ranking Member)]: So sorry. What is the benefit of doing this?

[Rep. R. Scott Campbell (Vice Chair)]: What's doing?

[Rep. Laura Sibilia (Ranking Member)]: Of switching this? So it seems yeah. What is what is what is the benefit to make this better tracking with the pool?

[Commissioner Adam Greshin (Department of Finance and Management)]: Yeah. Again, we did this for two reasons. One, so we could create a core enterprise services structure that would incorporate the full suite of what ADS is doing as opposed to what was before. And two, we could take a serious look at why the CIT fund, which is what funds ADS, has grown its deficit. And so this allows us more visibility with a smaller pool and isolated sources of spending authority that we can track much easier.

[Rep. Laura Sibilia (Ranking Member)]: So I think I'm starting to kind of understand what my problem is here, which is the IT projects. So I hear what you're saying about getting a handle on that pool, shrinking the size of that pool, being able to see more clearly what's coming in and out of it. So the IT projects itself is what this is the dashboard that we're talking about, like oversight of this as opposed to ADS oversight. And right now, what we're looking at is $5,000,000. I think I think, and I don't wanna put words in your mouth, but I heard you say before that the air there's a lot more IT spending than that going on this year. Mhmm. So as the IT oversight committee, how do we know that?

[Commissioner Adam Greshin (Department of Finance and Management)]: You would read the same reports that you get on a regular basis on your dashboard. I mean, I don't know how you track the status of IT projects, but that will be changed.

[Rep. Laura Sibilia (Ranking Member)]: So we have ADS come

[Commissioner Adam Greshin (Department of Finance and Management)]: in We won't as you know, if bespoke were the same size, if customized services funds were, you know, $4,748,000,000 dollars, you wouldn't know anymore.

[Rep. Laura Sibilia (Ranking Member)]: Can you give me an example of an IT project, just one, is going on that is not part of that fight?

[Commissioner Adam Greshin (Department of Finance and Management)]: Virtually all the IT projects. Can

[Rep. Laura Sibilia (Ranking Member)]: you give me just one example? Well,

[Commissioner Adam Greshin (Department of Finance and Management)]: we're gonna make sure we're important, the Medicaid Data Warehouse.

[Rep. Laura Sibilia (Ranking Member)]: Okay. So the Medicaid Data Warehouse. So how would we do our job to know if that project was on time and on budget and where it was? Both this committee and JITOC, would we have to go through each and every one of the agency's departments?

[Commissioner Adam Greshin (Department of Finance and Management)]: No. You just I mean,

[Rep. R. Scott Campbell (Vice Chair)]: it would show up on the dashboard. How do you

[Commissioner Adam Greshin (Department of Finance and Management)]: do it now?

[Speaker 0]: Look on in.

[Rep. R. Scott Campbell (Vice Chair)]: They could still

[Speaker 0]: We look on the dashboard. But they

[Commissioner Adam Greshin (Department of Finance and Management)]: could still commit. I mean, they're still overseeing this project. Just instead of paying the vendor, they're they're asking, in this case, human services to pay the vendor, but they're still overseeing the project. They hold a contract. They're, you know, telling AHS when to pay.

[Rep. Laura Sibilia (Ranking Member)]: They're telling AHS when to pay. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. And who makes the budgeting decision? And then you just said that ADS makes the spending decision, but they

[Commissioner Adam Greshin (Department of Finance and Management)]: tell a a to like, who makes the budgeting decision? The agencies and departments make the budgeting decisions based on what they can afford. They come to me and say, you know, we've gotta replace our, you know, x y z thing. It's gonna cost $20,000,000. Do I have that? Can I afford that? And, you know, we look at what's available. So they the agencies and departments make the budget.

[Rep. Laura Sibilia (Ranking Member)]: Okay. So when we think about IT over like, IT infrastructure investments, modernization function across the enterprise, those decisions are now gonna be budgeted at the individual agencies. That's right. They always were. But Yeah. There's just no duplicate spending.

[Speaker 0]: I feel like if I'm understanding this, maybe I'm boiling this down way too simply, but you said something earlier that was was a bolt of insight for me. So I'm gonna run it by you, and then you'll probably say, no. You got that all wrong, I'll be back to square one.

[Rep. Laura Sibilia (Ranking Member)]: I hope you got it right.

[Speaker 0]: But what I heard you say is that the agency and ADS still work together to fill out the ABC form, which is like the project's name. They talk about what they need, they figure out what it's gonna cost, ADS goes out and buys the product or negotiates the contract. Works with the agency on the rollout. That is all the safe. And that seems to me like the core of the work. And what is changing is that instead of ADS then paying the vendor and saying, okay, we're done now. Pay me back. Instead, ADS will say, oh, we're done now. Go pay the bill. So I'm not

[Rep. R. Scott Campbell (Vice Chair)]: seeing That's

[Commissioner Adam Greshin (Department of Finance and Management)]: that's the only change, madam chair.

[Speaker 0]: Okay. So It's the only change. Am not seeing a big huge difference here. I think my concern anyway was what about our dashboard? And I don't mean to minimize that because the dashboard's actually it is it's important. And by that what I mean is how do we make sure that ADS can get the info it needs and it's not gonna be some big protracted thing with all these broken data fields and stuff. It sounds like you understand that that's an important function that needs to be retained in your working with ADS on them.

[Commissioner Adam Greshin (Department of Finance and Management)]: Madam chair, we are working with them diligently. I mean, we understand what this committee needs. You know, I get it. And we've committed to providing that.

[Speaker 0]: I don't know if I summarized properly. I like it when I can do that sometimes.

[Rep. R. Scott Campbell (Vice Chair)]: So it'd

[Rep. Michael "Mike" Southworth (Member)]: be fair to say that the ECMO dashboard is still gonna be there. ADS is still managing the project itself, that dashboard will not change. They're still gonna update it. They're still gonna have the same information on it. Correct?

[Speaker 0]: I think that's what commissioner discretion is committing to say, yes, they will be able to do that. And

[Commissioner Adam Greshin (Department of Finance and Management)]: we are going to work with ADS so we make sure that happens. And, you know, we know our role. We know their role. We gotta we'll figure it out. Yeah. I'm just here to put your worries, your anxiety to bed. We'll get it done. You know? Law says we have to, and we will. We'll figure it out.

[Rep. R. Scott Campbell (Vice Chair)]: So one of my anxieties is maybe I don't say anxiety. I feel like there's kind of a mismatch when you have one entity contracting for work and another entity actually paying for the program. So ADF will authorize payment by the by the agency or department that's that's that's getting some work done. But it's still I I get that is there any other example of that of that separation of authority in in in state government? And is that is that something that we do?

[Commissioner Adam Greshin (Department of Finance and Management)]: Or when I don't I mean, I have to think about, you know, how we do that. I don't know.

[Rep. R. Scott Campbell (Vice Chair)]: Do you say do you understand what I'm thinking? I I I it just seems like a conceptual mismatch. And so that's and I I don't know that it's an an impossible thing. It just you think the vendors I mean, I ask you this question. Do you think the vendors know who's paying? Well, I think if I were a vendor, I sure wouldn't come to spend anything. And I would be seeking to satisfy their concerns and their needs, possibly. And if there was ever any divergence between what the contract said and what the people who are paying me want, then I would try to satisfy, I guess. I mean, I I I I get this is my discomfort. It seems like I would be trying to satisfy the people who are paying me, be the state of Vermont. The state

[Commissioner Adam Greshin (Department of Finance and Management)]: of Vermont is paying you. I don't think they make the distinction. I may be wrong. I'm not a vendor. Yeah. But I'd be very surprised if they make the distinction, whether it's the state of Vermont Agency Digital Services, state of Vermont Department of Public Safety. I may

[Rep. R. Scott Campbell (Vice Chair)]: be wrong. Yeah. But, you know, I get well, so I I

[Speaker 0]: You could also turn that around, though. And, I mean, it's equally it could be equally strange to have ADS, you know, authorizing payment for a bill or to a vendor for a project that, you know, an agency or department is it's their work. I mean, it's their thing. Right? So I I don't know.

[Rep. R. Scott Campbell (Vice Chair)]: Or the the agency or department might say, yeah. Well, wait a minute. That's that's not what we wanted or something like that.

[Rep. Laura Sibilia (Ranking Member)]: Is this are we going backwards, like, to how we used to do this?

[Commissioner Adam Greshin (Department of Finance and Management)]: Like, with DII? I don't know how DII Me

[Rep. Laura Sibilia (Ranking Member)]: neither. I think it's more centered in the departments and agencies. Do folks have more questions for commissioner Gresham? I mean, I can ask questions all afternoon.

[Speaker 0]: Within the time we have available, do folks have more questions for commissioner Gresham?

[Rep. Laura Sibilia (Ranking Member)]: So are we getting follow-up on this? I think the commissioner Gresham said he would provide some apples to apples type follow-up. Yes. And we could get have JFO come in. Yeah.

[Lisa Gobin (IT Consultant, Joint Fiscal Office)]: Yeah. And then I just have a quick question that I think might clarify things for the record. I'm Lisa Gobin with the the IT consultant for JFO. For the projects that are done and probably the one that you're familiar with is the ERP project. The project management standards correctly have sign off on deliverables that are appropriate for the business leads and then sign off from the technical side that are appropriate for the technical side. So there is that cross check and sign off from the business and the technology that's built within the project management methodology. And so that's important. So it's not like just like ADS doesn't go and sign off on business requirements for any project. They have the business lead confirm it through testing. Yes, this meets the deliverable for the contract. We'll pay this. So so that sort of, you know, cross checking is built into the project management methodology, it seems like that's what wasn't being connected necessarily.

[Commissioner Adam Greshin (Department of Finance and Management)]: Thank you for making that clear. I could have done a better job.

[Rep. Laura Sibilia (Ranking Member)]: No. You were good. So we shouldn't anticipate any more needs for project management, like more embedded staff because it's already practiced. So correct. You just described. I I did check-in

[Lisa Gobin (IT Consultant, Joint Fiscal Office)]: with the EPMO recently at CC John on this question where I asked about the oversight of sign off on deliverables to make sure it was the same for projects directly managed by the EPMO, managed by contracted EPMO staff, or projects that were actually being paid for by the agency, the formerly bespoke project. And she set the standards with the with the same.

[Rep. Laura Sibilia (Ranking Member)]: Thank you for your Okay.

[Speaker 0]: Yeah. Thank you, commissioner, for being here. Appreciate it.

[Commissioner Adam Greshin (Department of Finance and Management)]: You're welcome, Mike. Actually, this was a little bit

[Rep. Laura Sibilia (Ranking Member)]: fun. Yeah.

[Speaker 0]: Welcome to our committee. I think we should take just a five minute break so we can go offline and we'll be back discuss and vote on fivetwenty seven.