This column originally ran in the Owatonna People’s Press.
Miserable MNLARS
If you have had to renew your driver’s license or get new tabs for your vehicle in the last few months, you’ve probably had experience with Minnesota’s new system of processing those transactions. And if you’re like the hundreds of thousands of Minnesotans still waiting for a transaction to process, your experience was probably miserable.
The Minnesota Licensing and Registration System (MNLARS) is the new system that Minnesota uses to process things like vehicle registrations, title transfers, driver’s licenses, dealer licensing, and much more.
MNLARS has been in development for the better part of a decade. During that time, the state has spent $90 million over two separate appropriations to get it up and running. It was unveiled this past July, and the problems began almost immediately. Currently there are 300,000 vehicle titles in backlog – that’s about 60 times more than are processed on a given day.
My office has been flooded with complaints about the new system. The execution has been so awful that the Senate Transportation Committee held an emergency oversight hearing to figure out what happened and how pervasive the problems are. As we learned at the oversight hearing, the development process for the new system was simply not up to the standards we should expect.
Deputy registrars have been especially hard hit. These are the private small businesses that operate licensing centers, and they are experiencing significant hardships due to the MNLARS mess.
Prior to the oversight hearing, I had a long meeting with deputy registrars in our area to hear their concerns about MNLARS. What they told me was shocking – even some of the simplest transactions are being rejected by the system in large numbers. These small businesses are paid by the transaction; when a transaction is rejected, they aren’t paid for the time it takes to correct it. They are burning through their overtime budgets, lines are long, customers are understandably frustrated, staff are quitting, and employees are being hospitalized due to stress. One woman from the city of Bloomington testified during the hearing that they had used up their entire overtime budget in the first two months after MNLARS was unveiled, and the city may have to consider tax increases. If the problems aren’t corrected soon, registrars are going to go under. This is to say nothing of the impact on everyday Minnesotans just trying to do simple things like get new license tabs.
There are a lot of lessons to be learned from this, but an important one is that government is not the best entity for every project. I question if it is truly the role of government to be in the software development business. In 2012, the state entered a private contract with Hewlett-Packard to build the system, but canceled that contract two years later in favor of letting MNIT, a state agency, develop the software. This was a mistake – there are companies that are already much better at this skill than government is, and they have an incentive to create a successful product because they are punished if they don’t. We should hire those companies and let them do what they do best.
As for the current mess, you don’t just deserve answers; you deserve to know how the governor’s administration is going to correct their errors. I will keep pressing the administration for a plan of action to get back on track and fix every outstanding problem MNLARS is having.