The UW System said they are unable to comply with a 2005 law requiring all state agencies to post their contract agreements online because of technology problems.
The law requires all agencies to post their external contract information to a website called Contract Sunshine run by the Wisconsin Government Accountability Board. According to UW System spokesperson David Giroux, UW System schools are unable to report their contracts online because of problems with the way the website is set up.
Giroux said UW schools want to comply with the law, but are not capable of doing so because the UW System's contract database is incompatible with Contract Sunshine's reporting system.
Some contract information is available to the public on the UW System website and some campus sites.
""The fact is that we would love to comply fully with this immediately, however, we have two tracking systems at the GAB and the UW System that are completely incompatible,"" Giroux said. ""There is no effort to keep this information secret. There is no effort to ignore the law.""
According to Giroux, a 2006 estimate said the UW System would manually need to input roughly 41,000 separate contracts to Contract Sunshine to be in accordance with the law.
""We're hopeful [this issue] will be resolved soon, but it's going to require a significant investment in some way to link up our two systems,"" Giroux said. ""Either we're going to have to devote a whole lot of money to manually re-entering contracts … or we're going to have to spend some money on a computer fix that links up our two systems.""
Reid Magney, GAB spokesperson, said the Legislature did not give the GAB an easy way to implement the law.
""The Legislature, as they wrote the law, did not give us the tools ... nor the resources to ensure compliance,"" Magney said.
Magney said the system has shortcomings.
""[State agencies] are not able to export their data in a standardized format that we can upload into our system. We've been told that it's not particularly user friendly,"" Magney said.
