FORT WORTH -- Tarrant County commissioners approved a $150,000 settlement with a Southlake technology company Tuesday for work done in 2010 on a digital management system for criminal justice records.
The county's multiyear, $5 million electronic case management system came under scrutiny after a November 2010 auditor's report criticized the county IT department's oversight of the project and its cozy relationship with the vendor, XPedient Technologies.One month later, Mark O'Neal, the county's senior programmer for the project, was fired after a county audit found pornography on his county laptop. In April, O'Neal and his wife, Margaret, were indicted for fabricating lodging receipts while on county business. They pleaded guilty in October.County Administrator G.K. Maenius said Tuesday that in light of O'Neal's involvement with the project, an XPedient bill for $191,000 was re-examined and found to be legitimate."We went back and reconciled all the records, and we believe that we owed them the $191,000. In working with them, we all agreed that it would be in the best interests of XPedient and Tarrant County if we could simply settle this issue," he said."This was legitimate work that XPedient had done for us. Because of the [O'Neal] issue, we basically said we want to slow this thing down because we want to make sure we are paying for a product that we had received. It took so long because we analyzed everything. We found that, yes, there had been legitimate work done -- the source code was there. The source code works and it is in production," Maenius said.He said the county and XPedient negotiated the payment to $150,000.XPedient President John Bergman declined to comment Tuesday.Maenius said the company was happy with the settlement and continues to work with the county on refining the software."We agreed to how we are going to move forward. XPedient has done an excellent job for us, they have extensive experience on our electronic case system, and we are going to move forward," he said. "The system is working. For the money we spent, we got a viable, useful product."Steve Campbell, 817-390-7981Have more to add? News tip? Tell us
