When a person is found responsible for abuse or misconduct against a vulnerable child or adult in one Texas agency's system, can a different agency find that record before making a hiring or licensing decision? Before 2025, the answer was often no.

This session tells the story of how Texas state government closed that gap. Senate Bill 1849 directed the Department of Information Resources (DIR) to address the problem. What followed was more than a year of collaboration among four agencies, DFPS, HHSC, TEA, and TJJ, and the DIR Shared Technology Services program to design, build, and launch SEMARC (Search Engine for Multi-Agency Reportable Conduct). SEMARC is a single, secure platform that lets authorized users search all four agencies' misconduct and do-not-hire registries simultaneously, in real time, through a single query.

This session features three presenters that together tell the complete story:

• DIR: the agency whose statutory authority under S.B. 1849 initiated this work and whose Shared Technology Services program was the procurement and governance vehicle
• DFPS: the lead operational agency, which co-designed the platform, coordinated the phased go-live schedule, and now operates SEMARC on behalf of all four participating agencies
• Technology implementation partner: the delivery team responsible for the platform's architecture, cloud infrastructure, API design, and agile delivery model

Attendees will learn:

• How four agencies with different systems, different mandates, and different cultures agreed on a shared technical architecture
• The governance model that made co-ownership work, and how DFPS assumed the lead operational role
• What a phased, agency-readiness-driven go-live schedule looks like in practice
• The data integration approach that enabled cross-registry search while preserving each agency's data sovereignty
• Real-world results: 41,107 potential matches and 225 confirmed matches already surfaced across agency lines
• How the platform's architecture is designed for future agency expansion and what makes it replicable