Interior joins elite federal Y2K compliant club

The Interior Department announced today that all 90 of its mission-critical systems are Year 2000-compliant, several days before the governmentwide Year 2000 deadline.

"Everything is up and running,'' said David Brandt, the Year 2000 program coordinator at the Interior Department. "We wanted to complete installation before announcing that we are compliant. We didn't want to take any chances.''

Interior joins five other agencies that have reportedly fixed all computer systems weeks before the March 31 deadline imposed by the Clinton administration. The Environmental Protection Agency, the National Science Foundation, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the Small Business Administration and the Social Security Administration are the other agencies that have reported that all their systems are Year 2000-compliant.

The Transportation Department, Department of Health and Human Services and the U.S. Agency for International Development are the only three agencies that remain on the Office of Management and Budget's critical list for not making adequate progress toward fixing Year 2000 problems.

By next week, the Clinton administration expects more than 90 percent of the federal government's 6,399 mission-critical systems to be compliant. In OMB's latest progress report, released last week, agencies reported to have fixed 79 percent of all mission-critical systems.