The Comptroller of Puerto Rico publishes the result of an investigation into alleged irregularities with the contracting of services to migrate the enterprise data system, from the data center of the Central Administration of the University, to a cloud storage space.
The investigation revealed that the University paid $607,786 in 2020 for this project of migrating the data system to the cloud, which did not result in a benefit to the public interest and had no usefulness.
This situation is attributed to the fact that the technical personnel of the OSI, represented by the Brotherhood of Exempt Non-Teaching Employees, had filed a labor claim. In addition, the Office of Information Systems (OSI) did not supply in time the information required by the contractor to complete the project.
Three months before formalizing the contract, the interim director of Human Resources had opined that the services did not constitute a position nor created an employer-employee relationship. However, five months after the contract had been signed, Human Resources determined that the contract stripped the employees of the essential functions of their positions.
Another of the causes for not finishing the project was the intermittency in the communication between both parties, and when the OSI finally supplied the necessary information to the company, the contract was about to expire, there was no time left to finish the project and the University canceled the contract.
The Report notes that the interim director and the associate director of the OSI certified in 2022 that all the infrastructure of the system was located in the facilities of the OSI, and that the data was not moved to the cloud storage space.
The investigation recommends to the president of the UPR to issue instructions to the director of OSI to perform analyses of time, resources and operations before granting contracts, and to the director of Human Resources, to evaluate in writing whether the services can be rendered by university personnel before formalizing contracts..
Investigation Report OC-24-07 can be obtained on our Internet page: www.ocpr.gov.pr.
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