$89M down the state drain / CFO Alex Sink pulls the plug on Aspire, a failed privatization project.
Source: By STEVE BOUSQUET, St Petersburg Times (FL), May 18, 2007
The state of Florida on Thursday declared its effort to privatize its accounting systems an expensive failure, as Chief Financial Officer Alex Sink suspended all work on the 3-year-old project. After spending $89-million to build something new, the state is left with the 25-year-old system it had before. ……. Known as Project Aspire, the venture was an ambitious but unwieldy attempt to hire a private firm to develop a streamlined accounting system capable of serving 36 separate state agencies with vastly different missions.