Nevada DMV gets more time to identify bugs

Assemblyman Bob Beers, who heads a subcommittee tracking the problem-plagued Genesis system, says next Sunday's deadline for identifying the most serious bugs and getting an outside consultant to fix them has been bumped back a month.

Under the state's initial contract with Deloitte Consulting, all of the "critical" and "high" bugs had to be identified by Nov. 7 for the consulting firm to be responsible for correcting them. Any serious problems identified after that would have cost the state extra dollars.

Beers argued that more time was needed to solve the serious problems. With the warranty extension to Dec. 7, he has canceled a subcommittee meeting scheduled for Friday and now plans a Nov. 16 meeting for an update.

Beers had an upbeat analysis of the way the $35 million computer system is working now, despite the problems Genesis created when it was turned on Sept. 7.

"They're indeed resolving these things relatively quickly," said Beers, R-Las Vegas.

"The number of transactions they're processing per day is now to the point where they are processing at or above the level before Genesis began operating. They're keeping up," he said. "That's true of driver's licenses and registrations, but not true for titles."

Beers, a computer consultant, said, "If we can ignore the past and pretend the last two months didn't happen, I'd be giving it about a B at this point."

He said he is getting far fewer calls from citizens, whose major concerns of waiting in lines as long as six hours or driving without legal registration were addressed after Gov. Kenny Guinn started a plan to cut waiting time and to get the backlog of the mail-in requests up to date.

More people were hired; Guinn asked law enforcement not to ticket people for expired registrations; a hot line was created; and the governor said he would move up the starting date of $1 million worth of improvements using the Internet, automated phone service, and registration at emission stations to June 2000, instead of a year later.

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