R.I. to keep $30 million of $50 million Deloitte settlement

PROVIDENCE — Rhode Island gets to keep $30 million of a $50 million payment that Deloitte Consulting, the architect of Rhode Island’s troubled UHIP computer system, agreed to pay a year ago in exchange for a contract extension.

Gov. Gina Raimondo announced the $30 million agreement Wednesday, after close to a year of negotiations with the federal government, which paid the lion’s share of the $600 million-plus cost of installing and then fixing the eligibility-verification system for Medicaid, food stamps and other public assistance programs.

“Following months of discussions with federal partners, the $50 million payment will be split as follows: $30 million to the State of Rhode Island and $20 million to be shared by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services and the U.S. Food and Nutrition Service,″ the Raimondo administration announced.

The administration said the $30 million payment will allow the state to “maintain funding for current priorities” within the current fiscal year.

UHIP — short for the Unified Health Infrastructure Project — was supposed to streamline eligibility verification for the food stamp program (now known as SNAP), Medicaid, subsidized child care and cash assistance. It experienced major failures after launching in September 2016, and the effort to fix it has taken years.

On Wednesday, the administration reported: “Backlogs have dropped, timeliness has improved across programs and system incidents are at their lowest.”

According to the state, Deloitte has not been paid since December 2016, and the state has received more than $220 million in discounts and payments from Deloitte in that time frame.

The 10-year budget for the project includes $149 million from the state and nearly $500 million from the federal government.