As if the nation’s economic crisis isn’t bad enough, the feds are suspending an important revenue source — reimbursements for the state transportation projects — because of the state’s faulty computer system.

Kate Nash at the Santa Fe New Mexican nails that down in a story today.

Here’s an excerpt from Nash’s story:

The problem apparently stems from how reports are generated by SHARE, a multimillion-dollar state computer system that has been blamed for payroll and other glitches in the past.

The ramifications could be huge: About 40 percent of the Transportation Department’s budget comes from the feds. The department’s budget for the 2009 fiscal year is about $826 million.

Highway construction costs are shared, with 80 percent coming from federal money and 20 percent from the state. After each project, the state submits reimbursement requests.

In a letter Tuesday, a federal administrator said all federal aid billing is suspended until reports in the SHARE system are brought into compliance with a format agreed on by the Federal Highway Administration and the New Mexico Department of Transportation.

The letter said regulations require states to have financial management systems that allow federal officials to adequately trace whether funds are spent in compliance with federal law.

The news is a surprise, but not a shock. Albuquerque Journal’s Colleen Heild wrote a story Sunday that the state’s  all-in-one purchasing and human resources computer system, SHARE, is still causing problems for the state’s Department of Transportation.

The state DOT has endured problems for more than three years. I wrote a story in November 2007 when I was still a reporter at the Journal about the Federal Highway Administration threatening to yank federal dollars from New Mexico if something wasn’t done to correct the faulty system.

Transportation officials told me after that story ran that they were on the case and would patch things up, that they had formulated a plan that would satisfy the feds.

The thinking back in 2006 when state officials put SHARE online was that it would replace more than 70 disparate state payroll, purchasing and human resources computer systems. But from the start SHARE produced problems. State workers, for one, ran into all kinds of trouble, as did state contractors and jurors at the courts. Many of those early problems faded, however, with more spending to repair a faulty system.

But the state Department of Transportation continued to have problems. There was a sign even before SHARE went online that the DOT might be in for a nightmare with the new computer system.

Here’s an excerpt from that November 2007 story I wrote when I was at the Journal:

Concerns about the state transportation agency’s conversion to SHARE on July 1, 2006, were well documented. Prior to the conversion, an analysis done by Gartner Consulting said that while most New Mexico agencies were ready, the Department of Transportation agency was not.

[A DOT spokesman] said the state transportation agency “made a conscious decision to participate in SHARE” despite the warnings.

So the question remains why did the DOT go ahead with SHARE when it knew that there might be major headaches? I never really got a satisfactory answer from the state DOT on that score.