Tarek Tomes, who serves the North Star State as the Commissioner of Minnesota IT Services (MNIT) and state Chief Information Officer (CIO), has adopted a unique formula for assessing state priorities for IT modernization efforts among state agencies.

The state of Kansas announced that applications are now open for the Advancing Digital Opportunities to Promote Technology (ADOPT) program. The ADOPT program will award $14.7 million in grant funding to organizations addressing the challenges of broadband accessibility, affordability, and device availability.

FCC

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) announced a new initiative intended to strengthen and formalize the cooperation between the FCC and participating state attorneys general (AGs) on privacy, data protection, and cybersecurity enforcement matters.

When I was appointed Massachusetts’ first CIO by Governor Bill Weld back in the early 1990s, coming directly from the private sector, few if any state IT leaders had similar backgrounds. Since that time, however, we see governors – especially newly elected ones – opting for the Weld paradigm, finding their CIO from outside the state workforce.

The state of Kansas is using $3 million in Federal funds to improve its Judicial Branch records. The funding comes from the Federal Bureau of Justice Statistics’ National Criminal History Improvement Program (NCHIP) Grant Program.

fraud

As the Federal government is looking to recover and make sense of the rampant unemployment insurance (UI) fraud seen during the COVID-19 pandemic, experts today told members of Congress that the government is in dire need of a technology overhaul to keep up with fraudulent actors who are leveraging emerging technologies such as AI to steal taxpayer money.

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fraud

The Government Accountability Office (GAO) is estimating that unemployment insurance fraud during the COVID-19 pandemic reached a range of $100 billion to $135 billion – way up from the $60 billion the watchdog agency previously estimated earlier this year.

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