Austin American Statesman

Criminal investigators looking into Texas’ no-bid contract with Austin tech firm 21CT are now delving into allegations that the former state official in charge of billions of dollars in technology contracts abused her position when she urged companies vying for state business to donate to her favorite charity: Rodeo Austin.

How'd Karen Robinson get the job of being in charge? (Remind you of anyone? Reminds me of Dick Cheney deciding, after interviewing others, that he was the best person to be Dubya's VP)

As Governor Rick Perry's director of administration and technology, Karen Robinson was charged with finding candidates capable of meeting that challenge. But the only one the chief of staff trusted to take over the Department of Information Resources (DIR) was Robinson herself.

Not everyone thought she was doing such a great job. 

Committee Chairman Rep. Byron Cook, R-Corsicana, asked Robinson to list the changes made since meeting in September 2011, when he asked the DIR to pattern its procurement process on the bulk buying used by the State Comptroller’s Office.

But Robinson replied, “I’m not prepared to answer that question at this time.”

Cook wasn’t happy.

“I’m really disappointed you’re not answering the question,” he said. “I’m trying to calm down because we’ve had this discussion a number of times.”

Cook produced — as evidence of the DIR’s flawed system — a document indicating a 45 percent discount on Dell desktop computers provided to Florida compared to 13.5 percent in Texas.

Now, here's something interesting about 21CT- Jack Stick was pushing it. 

During a March 2012 webinar, a top Texas health official said his office was implementing a revolutionary tool to help Medicaid fraud investigators find bad guys: graph pattern analysis.

“Graph pattern analysis is really the next line of defense for this office,” said Jack Stick, then-deputy inspector in the state health agency’s Office of Inspector General, speaking to the National Conference of State Legislatures.

Stick’s presentation touted technology developed by Austin data analytics company 21CT, which had no experience with Medicaid and at the time wasn’t eligible to compete for such a lucrative contract in Texas....

Data coming in from MCOs is exceptionally problematic for 21CT’s technology to handle, state officials and company executives agree, because each cluster of physicians tracks, stores and reports data differently — and that’s if those organizations supply useful data at all.

In concept, it’s as if analysts gathered customer shopping data from H-E-B, Wal-Mart, Walgreens, Target and so on, lumped it all together and asked a program to find an individual’s shopping patterns and display them graphically. Tweaking those disparate data sets to identify potential fraud, 21CT executives conceded, is a Herculean and potentially quixotic challenge.

But one of the two people who spoke with the Statesman said, “I don’t know if or when we’ll be done with it, if we’ll ever be done with it. I can’t imagine an end in sight.”

Who's Jack Stick? Oh, THIS Jack Stick