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Sunday, December 06, 2009

Ind. Gov't. - More on "Post-IBM welfare process cloudy"

Updating this Oct. 23rd ILB entry quoting a story from Mary Beth Schneider's report in the Indianapolis Star on that date that began:

Secretary of State Anne Murphy had few answers for lawmakers today about how the state will transition to a new welfare delivery system now that the $1.34 billion contract with IBM has been canceled.
Nothing has changed, according to this editorial today in the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette headed "Give details of welfare hybrid plan." Some quotes:
State officials had plenty to say in 2005 as they prepared to sell a massive contract to run Indiana’s welfare-eligibility system. High error rates. Poor service. Fraud and corruption. Inconsistent performance.

All were charges leveled against the system of determining who was qualified to receive food stamps, Medicaid and other assistance.

“If we actually help a person in a timely manner, it is despite the system and because our employees’ compassion has found a way around our decrepit business processes,” wrote Mitch Roob, then the secretary of the state Family and Social Services Administration.

Now, three years later, in the wake of a disastrous experiment in privatization, FSSA officials are silent on details of how they will fix the mess they created. Gov. Mitch Daniels and his appointees owe Hoosiers a more transparent process than the one that created the ill-fated deal with IBM and Affiliated Computer Services, including a full accounting of what’s left of the state-run eligibility system.

Without the information, the continued involvement by ACS in the $1.3 billion deal suggests IBM was sacrificed to keep the privatization push alive.

For now, all that’s known is that a “hybrid system” will combine parts of the original state-run eligibility system with work done by ACS and the subcontractors hired to assist. The hybrid plan is supposed to be unveiled Dec. 14, but state employees at the county level reportedly have not been involved in working through the details and know little about how it will be implemented.

More:
Rep. Dennis Tyler, D-Muncie, isn’t waiting to see how and if a hybrid plan will work.

“The fox is still in the henhouse,” he said. “ACS is still at the head of this. We tried to be a part of this from the beginning, but they just shut us out of the process.”

Tyler is working with groups representing state employees and social-service providers to draft a bill to address the eligibility process. He said Republican state Sen. Vaneta Becker of Evansville and Sen. Vi Simpson, a Bloomington Democrat, are working on legislation. He’s optimistic the General Assembly will approve a meaningful measure but is worried the state’s budget problems won’t allow for the investment. A new computer system was supposed to be part of the makeover, but the same 20-year-old system is still in place, hampering employees’ efforts to serve clients.

“Trust us” is no longer acceptable when it comes to FSSA promises. The administration must become a full partner in ensuring a vulnerable population has access to the services it needs and deserves.

From Eric Bradner's story today in the Evansville Courier & Press:
The battle over Indiana's human services agency's attempt to update the way it processes welfare applications has been fought for more than a year now.

As some critics called for Gov. Mitch Daniels to cancel the Indiana Family and Social Services Administration's $1.34 billion contract with a team of vendors led by Armonk, N.Y.-based IBM Corp., momentum built over the summer in a State Budget Committee hearing and eventually led to Daniels' decision to heed those requests and fire IBM.

At a committee meeting in September, Rep. Gail Riecken, D-Evansville, told her colleagues that she wanted to see the contract canceled completely.

She wasn't satisfied when, the next month, Daniels canceled the deal with IBM but kept subcontractors such as Dallas-based Affiliated Computer Services Inc. on board.

Riecken filed legislation, which is due for a hearing at a House Ways and Means Committee meeting in December, that would require the state to eliminate the rest of those contracts.

She was met with resistance from the Family and Social Services Administration.

Officials there say they are concerned that Riecken's bill would force the cancellation of far more contracts than she intended.

Posted by Marcia Oddi on December 6, 2009 04:18 PM
Posted to Indiana Government