IT and IFMP Changes Cause Reimbursement Delays

“The NASA Chief Information Officer (CIO) and Comptroller are in the process of reevaluating the Agency’s Information Technology (IT) investment strategies to ensure they are in alignment with current Agency One NASA goals and priorities. With this effort underway, NASA Headquarters has issued a moratorium on the purchase of all IT hardware and software unless it is identified as mission critical.”

“The following letter was distributed on December 12, 2002 Dear NASA Vendor: Ames Research Center will be shutting down its financial systems in early January to cut over to a new integrated financial management system. The shut down may result in some payment delays.”

NASA Watch reader comment from GRC: “GRC is one of the “pilot” centers initiating the IFMS.  The system is so fouled up that our purchase account at Bank of America has been suspended  (No credit card purchases are being allowed by BofA) since the new system has so many bugs in it that payment can’t be made (so far GRC is more than 90 days in arrears).”

Another NASA Watch reader comment from GRC: “The travel manager package was not issuing reimbursement checks for a couple of months, especially to those people who made changes from their
original plans. There was a problem with getting the P-card software to authorize the
SAP software to make a payment to the Bank of America for our Mastercards that we use to make purchases. Bank of America recently “cancelled” our bankcards. We can’t buy anything since shortly before Christmas. They were trying to correct the problem, but as of Tuesday morning, no word was given on success. Management meetings have not been occurring since no one can download the financial data.”