State Computers Fall Short in Welfare Reform
California’s vast network of computers, an essential tool in the new world of welfare, is ill-prepared to handle several key requirements of welfare reform--such as tracking whether children are suffering under the revolutionary changes, reports show.
The deficiencies, state consultants have warned, could hamper the state’s ability to help find jobs for welfare recipients and could prevent it from answering the basic question: Are the 2.1 million people directly affected by the reforms better or worse off?
California’s technological network appears ready to cope with many welfare reforms, including time limits and penalties for rules violations. But recent consultant reports also concluded that the system is not adequately equipped to help merge recipients into the work force, or to monitor the impact of the reforms on poor families.
The network fails to provide much assistance in moving people into jobs, according to one consultant’s report. It generally does not give county workers access to a wide variety of information that could identify job openings, training opportunities and community services.
The system also does little to record problems encountered by children whose parents shift from welfare to work. Experts say that no effort has been made to tap into existing databases that track homelessness, child abuse, illness, movement to foster care and poor school performance.
“One of the greatest concerns with the advent of welfare reform, as it was defined in California, is that the focus is on the working parent rather than their children,” said Larry Singer, whose company conducted an eight-month study for the state. “As parents move into job scenarios, the children may be left behind.”
Singer’s nonprofit firm, Public Interest Breakthroughs of Venice, Va., recently completed a controversial report on the state and local computer networks that are viewed as the keystone to the success of California’s reconfiguration of public assistance. The report, which cost nearly $300,000 and was obtained by The Times, was privately distributed to state officials last week.
Early drafts sent such shock waves through the state Health and Welfare Data Center, which coordinates the computer network, that it immediately hired another consultant at a cost of $120,000 to review some of the conclusions. That study, though incomplete, questioned some findings of the first one.
The prospect of dueling reports prompted the Legislature to direct the Department of Information Technology, which oversees all state computer systems, to hire a third consultant. The new study cost $20,000 and confirmed the central findings in the original report.
Problems Need Ironing Out
The technology department’s director, John Thomas Flynn, said the consultants have provided an “early warning” that welfare officials need to fix the deficiencies before the network is mobilized over the next few years.
Assemblywoman Debra Bowen (D-Marina del Rey), an outspoken critic of the state’s ongoing computer problems, said the “battle of the consultants” at the welfare agency ultimately will cost about $440,000, although the first consultant’s report was adequate. Much of the spending was a waste, she said, but the approach is an improvement from the days when consultants were only hired to evaluate completed projects that had gone awry.
Del Luttges, chief deputy director of the welfare data center, said he will review all three reports before deciding on a course of action. Additional consultants were hired, he said, only after concerns were expressed about the accuracy of the first report.
Welfare reform, with its goal of getting people off aid and into jobs, is among the most people-oriented government programs. Yet its success in large part will hinge on technology and the ability of computers to keep track of what each recipient is doing.
California is expected to spend $1 billion to automate a welfare system that has changed drastically from the one in place when the federal government adopted the reforms of 1996.
The political pressure to create a workable welfare computer network is intense because of the expensive failures of two earlier state projects--one designed to keep track of driver’s licenses; the other, child support payments. Those computer projects were abandoned, costing more than $150 million.
California has more people--2.1 million, including 1.5 million children--on assistance than any other state. So the task of establishing computer systems that track and keep records of their activities is particularly daunting. “No other state will experience the type of problems that California will encounter,” the report for the technology department said.
Unable to devise a single statewide computer system, California allowed the counties to form four separate networks. Only one, which serves 18 counties, is actually operating. A second, serving Los Angeles County, is expected to be operational soon. A third has gone out to bid and a fourth is in the planning stage.
Already, according to state consultants, there have been some significant glitches. For example, millions of dollars have been spent on a new system designed to tie all the networks together, without first determining whether a system operated by the Department of Health Services could have performed the same function.
The brightest spot on the welfare computer landscape, Singer said, is the network planned for Los Angeles, which now comes closest to meeting the needs of welfare reform.
The report cited deficiencies in moving people into jobs. Much of the problem, it said, is a reluctance by government agencies to share information. “The philosophy of ‘my data is my data, and no one else can have access to it,’ prevails when we observed management practices among . . . health and welfare departments,” it said.
Both of the completed reports concluded that the computer network is not ready to handle a highly touted welfare reform provision that allows poor families to receive a onetime lump-sum payment to help them through a crisis, but diverts them from welfare.
The reports also emphasized a legislative mandate that welfare officials are responsible for tracking recipients and their children--particularly after they leave welfare.
“I think that’s an essential criticism,” said Jean Ross, director of the nonprofit California Budget Project. “If you can’t track the real outcomes, how do you know whether what you’re doing works or not?
“Are a lot of children ending up in foster care, where the costs are very high? Are they ending up in the juvenile justice system, where the social costs are big?”
No Easy Answers
Henry Brady, director of the UC Data System in Berkeley and an author of the report for the technology department, said that adjusting the system to track the effects of welfare reform on families is difficult and computer managers often are reluctant to undertake tasks they consider risky.
“My concern is we spend enormous amounts of money to create systems that only give us very, very narrow . . . things,” he said in an interview. “We want welfare to make people better off, and we believe in this country right now that we can do that through time limits. But I think it’s incumbent upon us to find out if that is indeed true.”
Luttges, of the welfare data center, downplayed the controversy over the Singer report, saying it had been resolved when the consultant agreed to modify certain sections.
He defended hiring a second consultant, saying several people had complained that their comments in the original report were inaccurate.
But Singer said his final report, which the data center found acceptable, varied only slightly from earlier drafts.
