Rhode Island
Transparency on Pause: After a $99M ERP, Rhode Island’s Salary Portal Goes Dark for Nearly a Year
What happened
Rhode Island Current reports that the state’s online payroll transparency portal—the public lookup for state employees’ salaries, overtime, and related wage data—has not been fed new numbers since Oct. 9, 2025. The portal is supposed to update quarterly. As of Castro’s Sep 17, 2026 story, that is nearly a year of stale data.
Department of Administration spokesperson Karen Greco said updates are “paused while the State goes through the ERP transition,” referring to Rhode Island’s roughly $99 million Enterprise Resource Planning overhaul spanning the Raimondo and McKee administrations. Greco said the new system holds more robust data than the legacy feed, that consolidating the formats takes time, and that “essential business operations currently take priority.” She could not give a timeline for when public updates resume. In the meantime, DOA says interested parties can still request updated payroll information.
Castro reports that other fiscal year 2026 payroll slices appear absent from the transparency portal, and that the expenditures database—payments to vendors, municipalities, and other entities—also lacked FY2026 data as of Wednesday afternoon. Contracts and purchasing sections of the broader portal have been updated more recently.
Open-government advocates were blunt. ACLU of Rhode Island executive director Steven Brown called a year “way too long” to leave easy access languishing on what is, after all, a transparency portal. Common Cause Rhode Island’s John Marion called the site an invaluable decade-plus tool for press and public and noted that former Gov. Lincoln Chafee launched it around 2013 voluntarily—without a statute forcing its maintenance—showing “the limits of government transparency that relies on voluntary compliance.”
The stall is another aftershock from the Workday-based ERP rollout (finance live July 2025; human resources and payroll in November 2025, shortly after the portal’s last feed). Months of paycheck, W-2, and benefits errors followed; McKee compelled the resignation of then-DOA Director Jonathan Womer in March 2026. In May 2026, state employees filed a class-action suit over Workday payroll problems.
Original reporting
Read the underlying coverage:
Rhode Island Current — Rhode Island state employees file suit over payroll problems (May 18, 2026)
Virtue Forge commentary
A transparency portal that does not update is theater. Chafee sold the tool as more information and more efficient use of taxpayer money. Nearly a year after the last payroll dump—and after a nine-figure ERP—Rhode Islanders who want current state pay data are told to wait in line for a special request while “essential business operations” come first.
Centralized IT that breaks the citizen’s view of the payroll ledger is the opposite of humble, trustworthy government. Free enterprise runs on auditable numbers. State government should too—especially after burning ~$99 million to replace COBOL and paper timesheets. If the new system cannot feed the old transparency portal, fix the pipe or publish a replacement. Opacity by upgrade is still opacity.