State Sen. Donna Kim is warning that a contract for a new Department of Taxation computer system is putting taxpayers’ money at risk, and she is urging Gov. David Ige’s administration to overhaul the payment schedule for the tax project before it moves forward.

Kim (D, Kalihi Valley- Moanalua-Halawa) contends state tax officials agreed to a payment schedule that provides too much money to contractor Fast Enterprises LLC too early in the project. Instead, she wants assurances the vendor will demonstrate that all newly installed equipment and software actually works as promised before payments are made.

"Just because they install software doesn’t mean it works," Kim said. She said she wants the administration to "protect the state to make sure that we’re going to get a system that meets our needs, and is going to work."

Kim has emerged as an outspoken critic of state efforts to launch a series of elaborate information technology projects, including a failed Department of Transportation project that the Ige administration scrapped earlier this year. That project was supposed to replace the department’s 30-year-old mainframe accounting computer, but the replacement system never worked, even after the state spent more than $6.87 million on the effort.

The tax department has struggled with its own computer issues for years. The state paid Canadian-based CGI Group Inc. $87.5 million from 1999 to 2011 to modernize the tax collection system, but tax officials have told lawmakers the department ended up with old technology.

Kim and other lawmakers questioned state Tax Director Maria Zielinski at length about the new tax department computer project at a hearing on Aug. 19, and Kim said she also met with Ige’s chief of staff, Mike McCartney, and state Chief Information Officer Todd Nacapuy to urge the administration to revise the payment schedule for the latest tax project.

Tax officials say the modernization program will replace "problematic" systems that contributed to long delays in processing thousands of returns and refunds in the 2015 tax filing season.

The new $60 million initiative to replace the current Department of Taxation computer system is being broken down into two phases of about $30 million each. The initial $30 million four-year contract was signed in July with the Colorado-based Fast Enterprises, a software and consulting firm that has completed similar tax projects in 21 other states and the District of Columbia.

Zielinski acknowledged that more than half of the payments for the $30 million contract with Fast will be made by next August, including nearly $10 million scheduled to be paid out as early as this month.

But she said a number of those payments are to be made at the front end of the contract because tax officials urgently need the vendor to install new scanners and other hardware before the start of the next tax filing season.

Zielinski told Kim she is confident the new system will be successful because of Fast’s track record.

"If you have a system that has worked for 22 states, it will work for this state," she said.

In response to follow-up questions about the payment schedule, Zielinski said through a spokeswoman that the contract with Fast was developed with the assistance of the Attorney General’s Office, special legal counsel and the state’s information technology specialists, and the tax department "does not intend to revisit the contract at this time."

Kim remains unconvinced, and cited other state projects that failed after the state paid vendors large sums of taxpayer money.

"This is the appropriate time to amend it, and if in fact everybody is so confident that this system is going to work, then I don’t see what the problem is if we adjust some of the deliveries and the payments."

Kim also raised concerns that Zielinski was a member of an executive steering committee that approved millions of dollars in payments for the vendor hired for the failed Department of Transportation project that the Ige administration canceled earlier this year.

The vendor on that transportation project was a company called CIBER, and Kim cited documents showing payments were approved for CIBER even though the new system it developed failed federal performance tests up until the time the project was finally scrapped.

"We kept paying them, even though they kept failing the test," Kim said. "She is the same person that’s now managing this contract."

Zielinski replied that her involvement in the DOT project was limited, and there are important differences between the two projects. The Department of Transportation system was highly customized, which Zielinski said is "an invitation for disaster."

"The bottom line is, that was not a commercial, off-the-shelf system," she said, while the new tax department system will be. "We are managing this very carefully."