| Financial Audit Division | Released November 20, 2018 |
The Office of the Legislative Auditor (OLA) has completed its first information technology audit of the Minnesota Licensing and Registration System (MNLARS) quarterly performance measures, as required by Laws of Minnesota 2018, Chapter 101.[1]
The scope of this audit included an assessment of select performance measures reported by the Department of Public Safety (DPS) and Minnesota IT Services (MNIT) in their April 2018, June 2018, and September 2018 MNLARS Quarterly Update reports. Specifically, OLA examined performance measure six, titled System Performance Including Slowdowns, Outages, or Other Performance Issues. OLA also examined the incident communication plan, called Plan for Communications for Transparent MNLARS Outages and System Slowdowns. The audit objective was to assess the accuracy and completeness of the information reported to the Legislature.
We identified four findings and recommendations for the agencies and MNLARS Steering Committee to consider when analyzing these and future quarterly reports.
Finding 1. The Department of Public Safety and Minnesota IT Services misreported a small number of system outages.
Finding 2. The Department of Public Safety and Minnesota IT Services have not clarified system availability expectations with their stakeholders.
Finding 3. The Department of Public Safety and Minnesota IT Services did not report system performance statistics for all stakeholders.
Finding 4. The Department of Public Safety’s and Minnesota IT Services’ monitoring tools do not measure all end-user outages.
[1] In this report, OLA uses the term MNLARS to refer to the State of Minnesota’s comprehensive information system and its subsystem components used to provide driver and motor vehicle licensing and registration services to Minnesota citizens.
