Letters to State Tech: Updates from Louisiana and New York

A Learning Experience

Thank you for featuring Louisiana’s DELTA Project, a comprehensive project to modernize our agency with an integrated tax system, in your Winter 2005 issue (“Unleashing the DELTA Force ,” Cover Story). We have received a tremendous amount of positive feedback as a result of the article. To date, we have hosted six state taxing jurisdictions interested in learning about our experience.

The end of the three-year project is in sight. The final phase of implementation, which consists of five excise taxes, is May 2, 2005. As with all other phases of the project, it is on schedule and within budget. Our employees are already busy with testing and with the development of specific training for this rollout.

Because of the success of the DELTA project, it has been submitted to the Federation of Tax Administrators for consideration of its Tax Administration Award, which is to be presented in June 2005.

We appreciate your interest in our success story.

Cynthia Bridges
Secretary
Louisiana Department of Revenue
Baton Rouge, La.

Making Connections

Thank you for the article “Image Is Everything” (Tech Response , Winter 2005). I need to make one clarification: Although the New York State Department of Correctional Services does use copper wires, our system has been fully digital for several years. So we have the benefits of digital both in the quality of our pictures and in the cost benefits of data transmission.

Your readers may be interested in two additional teleconferencing initiatives that have begun since your article was written. We have begun a televisiting program between New York City and two upstate prisons: One is a facility for women, and the other is a regional medical unit, or long-term healthcare facility.

The televisiting program should help families keep connected with inmates. The other initiative involves using teleconferencing to establish contact between parole officers and inmates in upstate prisons before the inmates are released and to facilitate their applications for Medicaid before release.

Equipment that was originally acquired to facilitate medical care certainly does that, but it has been shown to provide many other uses.

Lester N. Wright
MD, MPH
Deputy Commissioner/Chief Medical Officer
New York State Department of Correctional Services
Albany, N. Y.