Henrieta Molnárová’s abrupt resignation on 29 September has exposed a hidden setting in VelaTrace’s TraceMark platform: alarms for uncertain or outdated caller locations could be changed to “unresolved carrier event” and counted as handled. The Colorado software company sells TraceMark to emergency call centres to help staff monitor location data and network handoffs.
A review of public contract registers and regulator filings, alongside interviews with 14 current and former users, found that the recoding affected 1.2 million alerts between January 2025 and August 2026. The 63 centres using the platform serve a combined 22 million residents. VelaTrace disputes the tally and says no call was sent to the wrong centre because of the setting.
The alert that became routine
Molnárová, VelaTrace’s former reliability chief, said she resigned after executives rejected her request to stop the automatic recoding. “The dashboard did not say the network had failed; it said the failure had no name, and then it counted that as success,” she said in an interview.
The company’s user guide describes the category as a way to separate carrier-side problems from software faults. But the setting also removed the original location warning from the main summary screen, according to three dispatch technology managers who used the system. One manager said staff had to open individual call records to see the warning again.
A controlled test on a training version of TraceMark reproduced the change. When the test system received a deliberately stale location feed, it displayed an unresolved event in the detailed record but marked the alert handled on its overview screen. The test did not involve a live emergency call.
The dashboard did not say the network had failed; it said the failure had no name, and then it counted that as success.
Henrieta Molnárová, former reliability chief
Dispatchers saw fewer warnings
In Columbus, Ohio, call-centre technology director Olumide Odunayo said his team’s monthly summary showed 8,420 location alerts as cleared in the first half of this year. A later review of a sample of call records found 611 still carried stale or incomplete location data, he said. The city is now checking the remaining records.
“We bought a monitoring tool, not a screen that makes unresolved problems disappear,” Odunayo said. He said the city had not found evidence that a caller was sent to the wrong centre, but staff had spent more than 300 hours comparing TraceMark summaries with carrier records since July.
VelaTrace chief executive Gabriel Guzmán said the setting was intended to stop uncertain carrier data from being presented as a confirmed software failure. He said the company had not hidden a known outage, and that a software update due on 20 October would keep unresolved alerts visible. The firm declined to provide customer-level alert totals for verification.
Contracts face fresh scrutiny
Public contract registers show VelaTrace has received $41 million (about €35 million) in combined agreements and renewals from local agencies since 2023. Constance Gonzalez, a network-safety researcher at the Midwestern Institute for Network Safety, said agencies should require vendors to preserve the original warning and report any change in how alerts are counted.
The resigning executive’s claims have prompted at least four client cities to request reviews of their own alert histories, according to officials in Columbus and two other jurisdictions. VelaTrace says it will cooperate with those checks. Molnárová said she left because “the numbers on the front page mattered more than what the call records said.”
