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 January 2026
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To kick off the new year the CARS Project Team is profiling two of our Scrum Teams. Team 7 is working on developing Financial Transaction functionality. Team 8 focuses on automating correspondence. Both teams are enhancing the usability of the CAL-ACCESS Replacement System (CARS) for the Secretary of State’s office (SOS), the Political Reform Division (PRD), California’s campaign and lobbying community, and public stakeholders.
CARS Scrum Team 7 – Financial Transactions
Team 7’s work on financial transaction processing enhances accurate recordkeeping through automated assessment of annual fees, fines, and penalties. This activity generates invoices to which payments are applied. Filers can view invoices and pay online with credit or debit cards. The team’s work also touches on the SOS side of transaction processing, including tracking, adjusting, or canceling invoices, depositing payments, processing waivers and refunds, and generating reports.
Team 7 Members
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Laura Shultz, Product Owner, oversees PRD’s Data Support, Training and Outreach, Compliance, and Public Area units. She has been with PRD for more than 2 years, with more than 35 years of experience in wholesale distribution as a Purchasing and Sales Director. In her spare time, she sings with different rock cover bands in the Sacramento region. |
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Sabrina Nelson, Scrum Master, facilitates agile ceremonies and champions communication between stakeholders and development teams. Her focus is on building alignment, empowering teams, and driving continuous improvement across CARS. |
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Ryan Stutes, Technical Lead and Scrum Master, provides hands-on technical leadership and facilitates agile delivery. He works closely with SOS, PRD, and our Prime Vendor stakeholders to ensure predictable execution, high-quality outcomes, and clear cross-team coordination, emphasizing defect prevention, delivery discipline, and production readiness across all features. |
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Donelle England is a Scrum Master and Business Analyst (BA) for Team 7, Financial Transactions, and a BA on Team 8, Correspondence. She supports and facilitates work group sessions, sprint reviews, sprint planning, and helps create user stories. Donelle joined the CARS Project in April 2025. |
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Wendy Brown is a Subject Matter Expert (SME) for Team 7, as well as for Team 3, Third-Party Software Vendors, and Team 4, Business Common Services. She has 16 years of experience at the Department of Justice and a degree from Sacramento State University. Joining PRD in 2009, Wendy works on certification of software providers and vendors, fine waivers, and develops procedures and training. She keeps her focus on collaboration, continuous learning, and leading by example. |
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Ashley Rojas is an SME on several scrum teams for topics related to lobbying disclosure and activity reporting. She started with SOS seven years ago as a Student Assistant. Ashley has a Political Science degree from the University of California, Davis. |
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Leakhena Gill, SME, graduated from Sacramento State University and joined PRD in 2019 as a student assistant. She joined the Compliance Team in 2020 and continues to work on that team. |
Team 7 has laid the foundation for developing functionality that integrates our payment platform within the CARS system, permitting credit or debit card payments to be made with ease. Registered CARS users who are linked to the filing entity can view invoices. Receipts are available to view after payments are made. CARS will not allow payment greater than the amount of the invoice, which decreases the risk of overpayments and refund requests.
CARS Scrum Team 8 – Correspondence
Scrum Team 8 focuses on communication with filers through correspondence. Correspondence is used to relay official information regarding filing entity account actions including but not limited to acceptance of a filing entity registration, non-filer notices, assessment of fees/fines/penalties, and waiver request approvals.
CARS sends correspondence automatically based on schedules and business rule triggers, or PRD staff can manually generate a letter to one or more filers. All correspondence is delivered to the filing entity's message center in the application where it can be viewed and printed. If desired, users can choose to be notified by email that a new correspondence has been delivered.
CARS correspondence functionality is a major advance over our current manual processes.
Team 8 Members
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Chris Fultz, Product Owner, leads PRD’s Public Area Unit. He brings extensive leadership experience in high-volume, customer-facing operations, with a strong focus on compliance and data-driven decision-making. |
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Gwinith Clara, SME, is with the Compliance Unit and has been with PRD since 2011. Since 2018, her main focus for Compliance has been non-filer activity reports for campaign, lobbying, and major donors. She likes assisting co-workers, filers, and the public to piece together the kaleidoscope iceberg that is PRD and the Political Reform Act. |
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Troy Ramon, SME, is on PRD’s Training and Outreach Team and has been with the Secretary of State’s Office since 2011. |
*Team 8 also includes Donelle England, BA, and Ashley Rojas, SME, who are
profiled above in Team 7.
Team 8 Accomplishments:
The team is currently hard at work on the functionality and user interface for creating, managing, and distributing correspondence to filers. CARS automation will greatly improve timeliness and transparency in how information is communicated to our campaign and lobbying community.
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CARS Monthly External Stakeholder Meetings – This series of meetings on the second Wednesday of each month keeps stakeholders informed, answers questions about the CARS Project, and includes a functionality preview. The next meeting is on 2/11/2026, from 1:30 to 2:30 p.m.
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Third-Party Software Vendors – In December we finished Phase 1 of our three phases for certifying all vendors before CARS go-live. The phases are:
Phase 1: October 6 – December 19, 2025: Pre-certification setup in the CARS certification environment
Phase 2: February 23 – June 24, 2026: Integration testing and User Acceptance Testing (UAT) using formal test cases
Phase 3: August 10 – October 16, 2026: Administrative certification prior to CARS go-live in November 2026
Our Prime Vendor team has now finished development of APIs for 32 forms, with 24 of them ready for System Test.
We continue to meet with our third-party software vendors twice monthly, on the second and fourth Tuesday from 10:30 to 11:30 a.m. Next meeting is 1/13/2026.
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Program Increment (PI) Schedule – Work continues on PI 2 and includes end-to-end workstreams for all financial transactions, many aspects of system administration, user account maintenance, and portals serving filers, the public, and PRD staff. UAT for PI 2A has started. PI 2B UAT begins on January 12.
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PI 3 – Development for our third program increment started last November. PI 3 includes further development of financial transactions, correspondence, reports, and online help.
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The first step to submit a filing to CARS is to create a user account. Each account must be linked to only one person with a single unique email address. After an account is created and registered, users can assign themselves different roles in their campaign or lobbying organizations, or roles can be assigned to them by other CARS users. Note that user accounts are not needed to access CARS data via the public portal.
While a user account represents a single person with a unique email address, that person may wear several different hats, such as Treasurer, Responsible Officer, etc.
The role of Treasurer, for example, may be associated with one or more filing entities. The graphic below shows these relationships:
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How will I receive official correspondence for my filing entity?
When you register with CARS, your user account can be linked to one or more filing entities, such as a recipient committee, slate mailer organization, lobbying firm, etc. When linking your account with the entity, you are assigned one of the roles listed in the section above.
Correspondence can be viewed by anyone with a user account linked to the filing entity. After logging into CARS, you can access the dashboard to select any entity to which your account is linked. There you can view all correspondence sent to that entity and all correspondence history.
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What would you like to see included in the next CARS Stakeholder Bulletin issue? Email PRDCARS@SOS.CA.GOV to provide your ideas and feedback.
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The CARS Project Monthly External Stakeholder Meeting Series (MS Teams), PowerPoint Presentations, Q&As, FAQs and additional information may be found on the CARS Homepage.
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