HELENA – State officials said Monday that long lines for Montana vehicle registration are getting shorter as they work through bugs in a new computer system that has plagued titling clerks with delays.
Larry Fasbender, deputy director of the Justice Department that oversees the Motor Vehicle Division, told a legislative oversight committee that the MERLIN computer program is getting better, and that ultimately it will be a huge improvement.
“As of this morning, we are having very few problems with the system — very few complaints,” he said.
But the treasurer in the state’s most populous county said the situation hasn’t improved much.
“We are still not processing titles as fast as we did in the old system,” Yellowstone County Treasurer Max Lenington said in an interview. “I think Larry might be glamorizing a bit.”
Titling clerks have been struggling for two months with a system that has left them dealing with long lines and testy complaints from frustrated motorists.
Earlier this month the local offices were closed to give programers time to fix the MERLIN system, which has been used successfully in other areas such as issuing driver’s licenses.
The Department of Justice says a big problem came when the original vendor that built the program, BearingPoint, filed for protection in U.S. Bankruptcy Court and stopped fulfilling its obligation to fix bugs under the contract price.
That means the state must hire other programmers and vendors to fix it, and left open the possibility the state could exceed the $28 million allocated for the MERLIN computer program.
Lawmakers are paying close attention to MERLIN. They remember the disaster at the Department of Revenue earlier in the decade that cost millions before a computer program known as POINTS was simply abandoned.
“Any comparison between POINTS and MERLIN is way off base,” Fasbender told the interim Legislative Finance Committee. “We are nowhere close to where we were with that one.”
The DOJ notes that the new program is already offering such improvement as online vehicle registration renewals, saving customers time. About 1,500 people used the new feature as of last week, Fasbender said.
Fasbender said every new MVD system faces bugs when it is first rolled out due to the complexity of such programs and the volume they face. He pointed to critical headlines and complaints when the old system was unveiled in the late 1980s.
“Any time that you bring up a system like this, it is anticipated that you are going to have problems,” he said.
Programmers continue to work on bugs and then will move on to making improvements sought by titling clerks.
Cascade County Treasurer Jess Anderson said they are still running into problems.
“There have been some improvements, but there is still a way to go,” he said. “It’s hard. We see frustration from the customer, and we also see the frustration on our employees’ side, too.”
Lenington said his office was facing a line of 40 customers Monday afternoon. Renewals that used to take 15 seconds now take a few minutes — and title transfers that once took 15 minutes can require up to 2 hours to complete.
Lenington said about 15 minutes had been shaved off that lengthy time since MERLIN was first rolled out in April.
“I can see a flicker at the end of the tunnel, but only a flicker,” Lenington said.