The state continues to seek applications for services and award contracts. But the level of trust any vendor might have in the State to “pay its bills on time” is increasingly strained, especially after revelations like this one, where once again, a contractor had to secure a loan just to keep operations going due to delayed payments.
As Hawaii transitions out of the holiday season and into the new year, Politics Hawaii with Stan Fichtman was once again featured on KHON 2 News, sharing insights (or mana’o) on the key issues to watch in 2025.
The key question emerging from the shutdown of SMS is whether Hawaiʻi’s government and private entities are helping or harming local firms through their procurement rules and procedures when hiring local firms for consulting and other work. Additionally, it raises the issue of whether the “buy local” philosophy is genuinely supported by these rules.
The State Department of Business, Economic Development and Tourism (DBEDT) and the Hawai‘i Housing Finance & Development Corporation (HHFDC) have recently confirmed that the state contracts previously held by SMS Research & Marketing Services, which recently shut down operations, have been transferred to other entities.
It seems, the company has fallen on hard times, and its owner took out a loan to bridge the funding gap the company was experiencing, starting in August of 2024.
So the question now becomes more focused as to the current situation at hand, that a company with a large value, and with their work with Maui and the Lahaina wildfire, high profile studies, that in the matter of a few days, the company has shuttered its doors?
And if this shutdown stands, SMS becomes yet another reminder of the ever-changing landscape of businesses, of all kinds, in Hawai‘i.