Vendors waiting after DOE payment system crashes

The Department of Education’s computer system that pays bills for goods and serv­ices crashed during a critical upgrade two weeks ago and was still down as of Friday, paralyzing spending at Hawaii’s public schools.

The outage primarily affects payments to vendors. Neither payroll for employees nor food service for students is affected.

“I apologize to our partners and vendors who have been inconvenienced by our delay in payments,” Superintendent Christina Kishimoto wrote in a message posted Friday afternoon on the department’s website. “This is not the level of service we want to deliver and we recognize the hardship that this causes.”

The DOE’s Financial Management System, which dates to the 1990s and is used to process purchase orders and payments, went out of service during an Oct. 6 upgrade. The computerized system handles a wide range of payments, such as school supplies, construction contracts, school-level consultants and business travel.

“Hawaii DOE’s technology team, along with experts from the state’s Office of Enterprise Technology Services and contracted teams, continue to actively and urgently work to bring this critical system back up,” Kishimoto wrote.

“Vendors can be assured that when FMS is fully operational, we will be making every effort to bring all of our accounts payable to a current status,” the statement continued. “We are making every effort to start issuing payments again next week, and will keep everyone up-to-date on the status of our system.”

An internal memo sent to employees Wednesday advised them of the situation and asked them to hold off on noncrucial purchases until the system is back online. It offered other options to pay for goods, including using purchase cards, also known as P-cards, and small-purchase contracts.

The computer outage comes during a relatively slow part of the month, because most payments are processed at the start or end of the month, according to DOE spokeswoman Nanea Kalani.

“We are taking proactive steps so that once the system is back up, we can expedite payment for anything that was due in the last two weeks,” Kalani said.

“It’s a very old system,” she added. “We are just trying to maintain the system, but it is on the list to be modernized.”

After learning of the outage, the Honolulu Star-Advertiser called several principals Friday to see how their schools were affected, but did not get any responses by the end of the day.

The Department of Education operates 256 schools statewide.