The state’s financial management system helps state agencies administer multi-billion-dollar budgets and provides data to inform management and policy decisions. Leaders in Washington, facing continuing budget challenges, are aware the current system is outdated. We investigated to determine the status of the current system, how much a new system would cost, identify the benefits of a new system, and provide some leading practices for the replacement project.

Our analysis determined that:

• The current financial management system is not meeting the state’s needs. System inefficiencies accounted for more than a quarter of the time state agency staff spent on the financial management tasks we evaluated in this audit.
• The current system is not in imminent danger of collapse.
• A group of integrated software applications, called an Enterprise Resource Planning system (ERP), is the best solution at this time. Most states already have such a system or are developing one.
• A new system will be costly, but could pay for itself over time. The replacement will cost an estimated $172 million and provide $228 million in benefits over 11 years.

You will find the report here, or on our website at sao.wa.gov.