By VIRGINIA ELLIS, LA Times, November 21, 1997.
Copyright 1997 by the Los Angeles Times. Fair use.
SACRAMENTO--After spending $100 million on a computer system for tracking deadbeat parents, the Wilson administration abruptly abandoned the project Thursday, conceding that it was fraught with problems too costly to resolve.
State officials blamed the system's designer, Lockheed-Martin IMS, for many of the problems and said they were canceling a $103-million contract with the computer giant. They said they will seek unspecified damages from the company through an arbitration process.
"Ultimately, I expect [this] will be viewed as one of the most inefficient expenditures of tax dollars in California's history," said Assemblywoman Elaine Alquist (D-Santa Clara), who heads the legislative committee overseeing computer technology.
Begun in 1992 as one of the largest and most expensive state-run computer projects in the country, the State Automated Child Support System encountered problems almost immediately. County after county dubbed it unusable, complaining of operating difficulties, disappearance of data, miscalculation of payments and an inability to communicate with other government agencies. Some counties dropped the program, and it is operating in only 17 small counties.
The ramifications of the problems are enormous because the 1996 federal welfare law established a deadline of this Oct 1 for states to set up a centralized system for collecting child support payments. California did not meet the deadline, leaving the state vulnerable to federal penalties that could soar as high as $4 billion. And now officials say cancellation of the computer contract means that the state will not be able to meet the welfare law's requirements for years.
Lockheed Senior Vice President Julie Sgarzi attributed many of the company's problems to the vastly different technical requirements set by each county. She said the cancellation was by mutual consent.
For the Wilson administration, the project's failure is the third major computer debacle in the last three years--and the most costly. In 1994, the administration abandoned another company's computer project at the Department of Motor Vehicles after spending $51 million. Officials said the project, inherited from a previous administration, had produced an unworkable system.
Then in 1995, according to a state audit, poor management of a computer contract at the California Lottery forced the state to pay millions of dollars in unnecessary legal fees and contract dispute costs.
But advocates for poor children said the latest computer failure is the first one to carry a high human cost. The inability to easily track parents who do not have primary custody of their children from county to county, they said, means California cannot substantially improve its support collections. As a result, hundreds of children, mostly on welfare, are denied the extra dollars that would help provide them the necessities of life.
"We continue to have one of the worst child support systems in the nation, and this problem has not helped us," said Leora Gershenzon, an attorney with the National Center for Youth Law.
Child support collections are administered by county district attorneys, but funding is provided primarily by the state and federal governments. California counties are currently seeking support from parents without primary custody for about 3 million children, including 700,000 in Los Angeles County.
Los Angeles County, because of its size, is the only county granted permission by the federal govern ment to have a computer system that operates separately from the state's. Officials said the Los Angeles system, also developed by Lockheed, has worked well.
Child support officials in other counties praised the state's decision to terminate the Lockheed project, saying the cost of correcting the problems was too great. A spokesman for Gov. Pete Wilson said the governor had personally approved the cancellation. "The state was potentially looking at hundreds of millions of dollars to correct a system that had lost the confidence of counties," said Press Secretary Sean Walsh.
Stan Trom, director of the Child Support Division for the Ventura County district attorney's office, said he believed that the cost of correcting the system would be far greater than the cost of launching a new one. "The decision to start afresh is both going to produce a better product and save money in our opinion," he said.
The cancellation decision, state officials said, came after 10 weeks of negotiations with Lockheed.
"We had hoped to get the contract back on track, but it has become clear over the past several months that it was not possible," said Russell Bohart, director of the state Health and Welfare Data Center.
The state will now begin a series of work sessions with counties to develop a new strategy for automating the child support system, he said. Officials hope that a revised plan will be ready by February to submit for federal approval and financing, and that a new system can be completed in three years.
Although Washington so far has provided 90% of the money, state officials have blamed federal requirements for many of the system's problems. "When the federal government mandates a requirement from 3,000 miles away with no understanding of the complexity of our state, you're asking for trouble," Walsh said.
For example, he said, sprawling and populous California was required to copy a system that had been used in a small New England state.
Other officials said the federal mandate for a single statewide system also was unworkable in California.
But the legislative analyst who examined the project told lawmakers that the state also bears responsibility for the problems.
California, the analyst said, had been too quick to approve changes requested by individual counties, had not provided enough financial protections in the event of failure, had waited too long to pull the plug on the contract and had repeated many errors that had led to the DMV computer failure.
In addition to supplying computer services, Lockheed Martin, the largest defense contractor in the world, provides children and family services under contracts with 33 juristictions around the country. The latter operations are already the company's fastest-growing line of business, as a number of welfare agencies contract out collection of child support.
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