"All Government employees should realize that the process of collective bargaining, as usually understood, cannot be transplanted into the public service.   It has its distinct and insurmountable limitations when applied to public personnel management." – President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, August 16, 1937

by Andrew Walden

Has HGEA signed on to a suicide pact?

HGEA is on course to destroy the $37M overhaul of the State’s tottering manual payroll system. 

HGEA is sabotaging the State’s $60M overhaul of DoTax’ collection system.

And yet, HEGA’s alleged Executive Director, Randy Perreira, asks rhetorically, “Who the hell wants the payroll system to fail?” 

Perreira claims HGEA’s campaign to defund and disrupt the two tech overhauls are, “all about making sure that, at the end of the day, we can collect taxes and that the payroll system is going to pay them.”

At the end of the day, neither will happen.

The seeming political power play is actually a sign of Perreira’s weakness. 

HGEA has not yet endorsed a candidate in the upcoming Democratic Gubernatorial primaries.  Perreira tells Civil Beat December 1, 2017: “What motivates his members to vote in a governor’s race, he said, is whether they like the people the incumbent appointed to be their bosses.” 

In other words, HGEA leaders are unable to provide strategic leadership to its members—leadership that would say: “we need to stop obstructing these tech upgrades in order to ensure that we process our own payroll and collect the taxes necessary to fund our bloated contracts.”

An October, 2017 report from AdvanTech, LLC, posted December 6, 2017 on the Hawaii Office of Enterprise Technology Services webpage, describes how HGEA is killing off the DoTax upgrade:

The political component has now been further exacerbated by the filing of grievances with the union by a number of DoTAX employees claiming issues with the new Tax System Management (TSM) management (effective July 2017), and intervention by the union with the legislature, governor’s office, and the press.  The overall impact of this politicization of the program is to create an image of failure, which could end up being self-fulfilling. (p 11)

What drives HGEA members’ dissatisfaction? 

a negative attitude by some users because the new system does not do things the in exactly the same manner as the old. (p 12)

Because the legacy systems and previous failed projects were custom built systems, some DoTAX staff have had the expectation that GenTax could be configured either exactly as it is done in legacy, or otherwise customized to follow a preconceived notion of how a process should be done. (p 18)

Can Ige’s contractor can create an old-tech style interface so that HGEA members can use the new tech without discerning the slightest change?  Anything short of that and mafia candidate Colleen Hanabusa will be selected.

HGEA instructed its Legislature to deny funding for the DoTax upgrade in 2017.  AdvanTech explains how HGEA will finish the job:

A similar denial of funding in the next session will almost certainly ensure that the program will not reach full completion, and could possibly interrupt R4 in mid-stream. This would require DoTAX to work in multiple systems (the legacy system and the new GenTax system), prevent DoTAX from realizing fully the anticipated benefits of TSM, and leave significant exposure to the failure of the remaining legacy systems. (p 20)

This is not the first time HGEA has sabotaged tech upgrades.

In his December 10, 2017 column, David Shapiro explains, “(the $60M tax collection) project is to replace a previous $87.5 million tax department computer modernization that was declared outdated before it was finished….  (And) two years ago, Ige scrapped a useless new financial software system in the Department of Transportation and sued the now-bankrupt contractor in a likely doomed attempt to recover nearly $14 million the state paid.”

Both projects died from HGEA malfeasance.

Using the same tactics, HGEA also killed off a 2008 DoTax initiative employing a private contractor to collect taxes, as explained in “Audit fuels ‘clinically psychotic’ HGEA effort to strangle tax collection”:

The HGEA was outraged when (contractor) CGI in January, 2008 landed a $25M contract to increase Hawaii Tax collections—doing a job supposedly performed by HGEA members.  DOTax reported September 22, 2010 that CGI had raked in over $100M in tax revenues.  DOTax projected CGI would collect tax revenue of $120M by the end of CGI’s contract June 30, 2011.  But the HGEA was not mollified by CGI’s ability to rake in the bucks that its members need in salaries in order to pay their dues and contribute to the reelection of union-owned politicians.  Instead union operatives worked diligently to sabotage CGI’s tax collection efforts….

A CGI memo quoted in a 2010 State Auditor’s report described the HGEA members who were controlling the union’s agenda:

• “Clinically psychotic”;
• “Smart yet can be very air headed”;
• “Weak leader and easily manipulated”;
• “EXTREMELY ODD [PERSON]”; and
• “Not respected by his peers within the state.”

These are the people Randy Perreira answers to.  They will choose your next Governor.

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