Maryland Renewed an Unfinished System Without Telling the Board

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In June 2023, Maryland’s Office of the Attorney General went to the state Board of Public Works for approval to renew a software contract. The contract was for a case management system, procured in 2017 and worth $3.6 million across its four-year base period and two 2-year renewal options. The request was for the second of those options, and the option was exercised. What the board was not told, according to an audit the state’s Office of Legislative Audits released in October 2026, was that the system still had not been fully implemented. The auditors’ previous report on the office, dated May 25, 2023, had already faulted it for not disclosing the contract’s problems to the board when exercising option years. The June 2023 request came weeks later.

The contract ran out in June 2025. By March 2026 the office had paid the vendor $1.8 million. As of April 2026 the system was not implemented in one division and only partly implemented in another. The auditors also found that the office had paid $475,000 in implementation costs that, under the contract, were not due until the system was fully implemented, and that it had not obtained information the contract required, such as weekly status reports. The delay is serious: the audit puts the system about seven years past its original estimated implementation date. The renewal is still the part worth slowing down on.

What the Board Was Told When the Renewal Was Requested

A renewal option is one of the lighter decisions in public buying. There is no new solicitation and no new evaluation. Someone asks a board to keep going, and the board decides on whatever the request puts in front of it. Maryland’s auditors say the office “did not disclose the ongoing vendor issues to the BPW when it requested approval for the second renewal option in June 2023.”

The audit’s remedy is to tell the board now. It recommends that the office “retroactively notify the BPW” that the system had not been fully implemented before the contract expired, and that future requests disclose all pertinent information. The office agreed and set itself a deadline of December 31, 2026. That letter can arrive as late as three and a half years after the 2023 request it should have accompanied, and a year and a half after the contract ended.

Full Disclosure Would Not Have Shown Whether the System Fit Each Unit

Say the 2023 request had told the board everything the auditors had already reported by then. The board would have heard that required deliverables had not been received and that money had gone out before the system was finished. Those are facts about whether the vendor kept its side of the contract, and they matter. They are also what the office now promises to check on its current maintenance contract and on the replacement system it plans to buy. Its response says the contract monitor “will confirm receipt of required deliverables before approving any related invoice.”

The only words in the report about whether the system served the people using it come from the office’s own response, not from a finding. The office says the system is fully implemented in its Civil Division, which accounts for more than half of its personnel, and is in use in two units of its Consumer Protection Division. Then it adds: “The instance delivered to the Medicaid Fraud and Vulnerable Victims Unit did not meet that Unit’s needs.”

That is the question a renewal ought to answer: whether the system did the job for the people it was bought for. None of the four recommendations on this contract asks it. A monitor matching deliverables to invoices would not catch it either, because a unit can receive everything on the list and still end up with a system that does not fit its work.

Write Down What Each Unit Needs Before Anyone Asks to Renew

The auditors raised the same monitoring problem in their prior report, and the office had said it would fix it by June 2023. The office told the auditors it was not fixed “because of staff turnover.” I don’t treat that as anyone’s personal failing. People change jobs. But when a promised fix depends on who is in the job, turnover is enough to stop it.

A buyer can fix that before the first vendor is ever contacted. Write down, in the buyer’s own words, what each unit needs the system to do and how anyone would be able to tell it is doing it. Keep that page with the contract, not with the project team. Then a renewal request has something to be measured against, and the board voting on it can see the answer unit by unit, whoever happens to hold the job that year. In The Value Standard that page is called a Request for Value.

It works in the vendor’s favor too. A vendor whose system is, by the office’s account, fully implemented in a division holding more than half of its staff has a strong case at renewal, and a written standard lets it make that case on the record rather than on goodwill.

Source: Office of Legislative Audits, Maryland General Assembly, Fiscal Compliance Audit, Office of the Attorney General, October 2026, Finding 1 and the agency response. https://dls.maryland.gov/pubs/prod/NoPblTabPDF/OAG26.pdf

Keep reading: ACT II · Chapter 9: The Value Control Loop