So as you probably know, Rhode Island’s new computer system (UHIP) for qualifying applicants and disbursing social program benefits is a mess. The problems have been well publicized to the point of infamy: a backlog of applications; benefit payments delayed; nursing homes (who have no easy way to stop their expenses) wracking up serious amounts of uncompensated care; even a security “glitch” that could have exposed the personal information of 200-1,000 customers.

It has gotten to the point that the feds were compelled to step in again – this time, breathing fire.

The agency continued to warn that the DHS could soon lose federal funding for administrative costs because of the system’s “failure to meet FNS statutory and regulatory requirements.”

And a Rhode Island House committee held its second hearing into the matter on Monday.

The question is, who is responsible for all of this? Was this a failure by the vendor setting up the new system, Deloitte Consulting? Or did the Raimondo administration force a transition to the new system from the old too quickly? (This, in fact, was a blunt warning by the feds to the Raimondo administration in early September.) If so, why?

In order to shed some light on the matter, the Providence Journal’s ace reporter Kathy Gregg sent the Raimondo administration an APRA request on September 7 for

all correspondence between the state and the company that designed it: Deloitte Consulting.

We pause here to go back, review and note that the subject of Gregg’s request was “correspondence”.

Gregg reports in yesterday’s Providence Journal that six weeks later – on the night before Thanksgiving, to be precise – the Raimondo administration gave her a thumb drive that purported to respond to the request. It contained only reports from Deloitte – and those only through September 6. Critically, the thumb drive contained no correspondence whatsoever between the Raimondo administration and Deloitte.

To reiterate: Gregg asked for correspondence. What she got was reports. (In the same way, Gregg might ask a Raimondo-operated fruit stand for a bag of oranges and receive, instead, a small bag of turnips.)

This non-responsive response by the Raimondo administration would appear to conform to neither the letter nor the spirit of Rhode Island’s APRA law. Nor is it the action of a Governor who, in an interview with Rhode Island Public Radio thirteen months ago, claimed to be “deeply committed to transparency”.

I asked the CEO of the Rhode Island Center for Freedom and Prosperity (full disclosure: I work with the Center), Mike Stenhouse, if he had a reaction to this. He responded,

A curious, honest, and relentless free-press is vital to preserving democracy in our free society and in holding elected officials accountable to the people. In this case, the administration’s pitiful non-response certainly makes it appear as if they have something to hide.

When a reporter like Kathy Gregg asks questions, she isn’t just asking for herself and her newspaper, she makes the request on behalf of all Rhode Islanders. Something went wrong with the launch of a major new state computer system – a system, remember, that has come in at over triple the originally budgeted cost. We are all minimally owed answers about the why and how of all of this. It is time to move from the dodgy non-responses to the straight answers and transparency to which the Governor herself has indicated that she is “deeply committed”.