The Interior Department appears unsure what to do with a decade-old system it uses to calculate and disburse money due to the federal government and Native Americans from mineral leases made on public and tribal lands, according to material supplied to FierceGovernmentIT under a Freedom of Information Act request.

We requested documents from the "iStat" meetings that Interior began holding around the time that the Office of Management and Budget stood up its "TechStat" meetings to review agency information technology programs. (We FOIAed OMB to get more information about TechStat, too--twice.)

In response to our request for documents associated with all iStat meetings held within the interior Department's office of chief information officer, we received documents from what appear to be half a dozen meetings held between October 2010 and June 9, 2011, all concerning one system: The Minerals Revenue Management Support System.

The system, according to information in the documents, has an operating budget of $18.19 million, a development, modernization and enhancement budget of $2.88 million and a fiscal 2011 spending plan of $15.7 million. (Fiscal 2011 ended on Sept. 30.)

Although MRMSS was built on commercial enterprise resource planning technology platform, the system "has had an extensive 60 percent customization," says an iStat report dated March 4, 2011.

The same report notes that "COTS customizations at even a 5-10 percent level have been found to represent a significant amount of risk."

The question facing Interior, the report continues, is whether to keep, refurbish, or replace MRMSS "with a much expanded capability designed to meet a greater departmentwide need for this type of service."

MRMSS cost $59.8 million to develop from fiscal 1999 through 2008, the FOIAed documents say, and cost $106 million to support during that same time period. Accenture was the prime contractor. Accenture also signed in 2008 a 10-year (with options) contract for operations and maintenance, with operations and support likely to cost $8.13 million annually, according to the iStat report.

Costs under the new Accenture contract, says a slide from an iStat meeting held on Oct. 26, 2010, were being applied against "outdated cost assumptions from the old O&M contract," thus generating "significant and incorrect cost variances."

The documents also state that MRMSS currently resides within the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement--the successor to the discredited Minerals Management Service--but that it will transfer to the Interior office of policy, management and budget.

For more:
- download the FOIAed iStat documents (.pdf)

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