It's hard to keep a good scandal down

Back last January, we noted that the Regents had for several years held closed-door meetings on the "Pension Administration Project," a mysterious topic title that appeared to involve a failed computer system project for pension administration.* Details were leaking out and appearing in popular news sources.

Now columnist Dan Walters seems to have stumbled on it:

From CalMatters: The University of California is one of the world’s most prestigious centers of higher education and cutting-edge medical, technological and social research. One assumes that its faculty and administrative cadre are saturated with extremely bright people. Nevertheless, UC has succumbed to a managerial disease that has afflicted other corners of state government — the chronic inability to successfully adopt information technology...

UC’s attempt to upgrade its pension system echoes that experience. As described in an article by Politico, a website devoted to politics: “In April 2019, the University of California unveiled a new computer program that school officials promised would overhaul its clunky, outdated system for disbursing pension payments to more than 150,000 former employees.

“Glitches and bad data, however, marred the launch, delaying payments and causing other problems. Now, six years later, the university is still embroiled in a bitter legal fight with the contractors it hired to build the system, claiming the companies repeatedly misled and defrauded the university.”

...Twelve years ago, UC officials awarded contracts to two companies, Sagitec Solutions and Linea Solutions, worth $28 million to upgrade the pension system’s outdated computer system. When the upgrade was tested a half-decade later, chaos erupted. Pension payments weren’t delivered on time, pension calculations were riddled with errors, UC retirees pelted the system’s administration with complaints, and the contractors and UC executives began pointing fingers of blame at each other.

...I once asked an acquaintance who sold computer software to state agencies why so many systems failed. He said bureaucrats often don’t know what they want and are rarely conversant about tech capability, leading to misunderstandings about what will be done...

Full story at https://calmatters.org/commentary/2025/12/university-california-pensions-technology/.

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*https://uclafacultyassociation.blogspot.com/2025/01/a-clue-to-ongoing-mystery.html.