An Assembly subcommittee on Wednesday voted to approve budget change proposals from the California Department of Technology, one of which would enable the state to permanently establish a security auditing program.
The proposal would give the department budget authority to spend nearly $1.6 million to fund 11 permanent staff positions in order to do regular security compliance audits for state agencies and departments.
A pilot project has completed five security audits during the past year and three more will be done before the end of the 2015-16 fiscal year, said Andrea Wallin-Rohmann, the Department of Technology's chief deputy director of policy and the state's acting information security officer.
The pilot has demonstrated that the auditing program has "great merit" and benefit to the state of California, she said.
The funding request comes on the heels of the state's former chief information security officer, Michele Robinson, and state CIO Carlos Ramos, leaving their roles. A 2015 state audit found that many state agencies and departments aren't fully compliant with existing state security reporting policies.
A separate request proposes $1.7 million in budget authority and a dozen staff positions to deal with workload issues. Ten of the positions would be for the department IT Oversight Division, and the other two would be for the Statewide Technology Procurement Division.
The Legislative Analyst's Office and the Department of Finance did not raise any concerns with these budget requests.
