State’s Delays in Completing Child Support Computer System Jeopardize U.S. Funds

California officials said Friday that the state will miss a federal deadline to complete an ambitious $150-million child support computer system, jeopardizing millions in federal money that has already been committed to the project.

Congress has mandated that every state have an automated system working by Oct. 1, but although California has pumped more than $88 million into the system, it has been plagued by delays and design problems.

A number of other states are having similar problems, and could be forced to return some federal money unless Congress votes to extend the deadline. California would have to give back an estimated $30 million. In addition, the federal government’s contribution to the costs of developing the system would drop to 66% from 90%, forcing the state and counties that are relying on the new system to bear more of the costs.

“We’ve been working very hard, but when you look at where we are now, I think it’s hard to envision us meeting the deadline,” said Michael C. Genest, deputy director for the information technology division of the state Department of Social Services, which is overseeing the statewide system.

“I think we need to take another look at the way the development is going and we will be working on a new schedule (for completion) and one that will be more realistic,” he said.

Genest said his office would announce a new timeline for completion within a few weeks but he could give no definite projection of how much longer it will take to get the system operating.

While expressing regret at the delay, Genest also said he is confident that the deadline will be extended and that the state risks no penalties--partly because many other states will probably miss the target date as well.

“I don’t think there is any substantial fiscal risk to exceeding the deadline,” he said.

However, some legislators said it is not certain that the deadline will be extended and criticized state officials for their failure to move more quickly on the project.

“It’s going to cost us tens of million of dollars to put this back on track,” said state Sen. Diane Watson (D-Los Angeles), who chairs the Senate’s Health and Human Services Committee. “I think the Wilson Administration showed real incompetence in getting this together.”

Federal officials said Friday that they had not formally received word from state officials that the deadline would not be met.

“We knew California has been having some problems, but we’ve been trying to work with them to make sure that they meet the deadline,” Gene Walker, a spokesman for the regional office of the Administration for Children and Families, said when told of Genest’s statements.

But Walker agreed that other states are in the same boat. “We’ve been investigating how the deadline might be extended if a lot of the other states don’t meet it as well,” he said.

The system--called the Statewide Automated Child Support System--is supposed to link family support units in the district attorney’s offices of 57 California counties, helping to track down absent parents and remove many of the redundancies and inefficiencies that have marked the state’s child support collection system.

State officials project that the system could increase collections by several hundred million dollars a year, automatically tapping into employers’ reports and property, tax and public utilities’ records.

But many child support advocates say they are less than sympathetic to pleas for an extension of the deadline, noting that the state has had eight years to get its act together.

Brian Paddock, a lawyer with Legal Services of Northern California who has monitored the state project, charges that the state dawdled on the plan for years, trying to get federal waivers to allow each county to devise its own computer system.

State officials say they were hampered in part by a drawn-out appeal by an unsuccessful contractor who lost the bid on the project. The state in 1992 contracted with Lockheed Information Services to design the new system by the Oct. 1 deadline.

Holli Ploog, chief executive officer of Lockheed’s children and family services division, said design changes required by new federal legislation have added to delays.

“The whole financial distribution system had to be redesigned at a cost of probably 20,000 to 30,000 man hours,” Ploog said. “It set us back probably six months.”

But state officials also concede that systemic bugs have hampered efforts.

“One dry-run training session that involved representatives from a couple of counties did not go real smoothly because we had an early version of the system that had bugs in it,” said Leslie L. Frye, chief of the state’s Office of Child Support. “That told me we were not ready to finalize the system. But we said, ‘OK, let’s go back and redo it.’ But I also think we have an excellent system that will take us into the future.”

Still, the move into the automated future has not been trouble-free. Los Angeles County last month launched its own automated child support computer, which under federal requirements must be able to communicate with the state system when it goes on-line. However, the county system’s debut was marred; officials said this week that distribution of 18,000 child support checks was delayed because of computer problems.