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Automated chaos
The state welfare office spent 10 years and $69.7 million to computerize its operations, but social workers and clients complain the new system doesn’t work
BY KRISTEN LOMBARDI

CINDY KARTCH recently found out what it’s like to be victimized by a nameless, faceless machine. Kartch, 48, a former waitress from Arlington, is one of the 360,000 Massachusetts residents who make up the state’s welfare rolls. Ever since 1988, when she was diagnosed with post-traumatic-stress disorder and depression, she has collected disability and food-stamp benefits. Earlier this year, Kartch set out to re-apply for food assistance, as she does every two years. She gathered bank statements, therapy receipts, utility bills, and similar documentation to prove her eligibility. She sent them all off to the Massachusetts Department of Transitional Assistance (DTA), which administers state and federal welfare programs for the Commonwealth’s poor, elderly, and disabled. Within weeks, Kartch received a letter. The computer-issued notice, dated January 19, explained she was entitled to $68 in food stamps per month. The benefits, it said, would be credited to her electronic account on February 11.

"I thought, ‘Great, everything’s fine,’" Kartch recalls. But on February 11, she checked her food-stamp account using an automated phone system, much as you do with a credit card, and discovered that her balance was zero. She checked her account several days later — again, it was empty. On February 20, more than a week after her benefits were scheduled to kick in, she still hadn’t received them. Angry and confused, Kartch called her DTA representative.

"I said, ‘Look, I don’t have any money for food. What the hell is going on?’" she recalls. The representative sounded surprised; he remembered entering her application into the computer. "He suggested waiting another day." Five days passed before she called back. This time, she got a straight answer. "My case worker said to me, ‘To tell you the truth, we spent like $80 million on a new software program, and it sucks.’" What had happened to Kartch, she was told, was happening to scores of recipients who had also re-applied in January.

Kartch pleaded with her representative to do something, but he said he couldn’t. She contacted three DTA supervisors — to no avail. On March 1, three weeks after she should have received food stamps, she got her benefits — or, rather, $58 worth. "It’s absurd," says Kartch, whose monthly income totals $679. "When I finally get my food stamps, it’s the wrong amount." To this day, she cannot quite fathom the whole ordeal, which she finds reminiscent of Big Brother. It can be demoralizing to have to seek public assistance. Now, she says, "You have a heartless machine making erroneous decisions about people’s lives."

Kartch’s experience may not be isolated. In interviews, a dozen DTA social workers and recipient advocates chalk up her missing food stamps to the department’s Benefit Eligibility and Control On-line Network, otherwise known as Beacon. "The machine is a monster," says Frank Rocchi, a 26-year social worker in the Greenfield welfare office, "and I like computers." Almost everyone agrees that technology can make office life easier. And Beacon is intended to replace the reams of paperwork — used to determine which applicants can receive aid, and how much — that long saddled the DTA. In the process, it’s meant to free social workers to do what they’re supposed to: steer families out of poverty.

On August 14, 2001, the automated network — after a decade of development and $69.7 million in federal and state funding — kicked into service mode across Massachusetts. It is currently in place at 37 DTA offices, where roughly 1200 employees use it daily. Yet just seven months into its implementation, social workers are complaining the system doesn’t live up to its expectations. Instead of streamlining the process, they assert, Beacon has made their jobs more cumbersome. The computer system seems riddled with glitches, bugs, and other irritating inadequacies that workers say they cannot override. Rocchi, who heads a 12-member group that meets with DTA administrators to air grievances about Beacon, has documented 34 major software problems since August. Of those, he says, the administration has addressed three.

It’s difficult to compare life at the DTA today to life before automation. The administration maintains that it never checked client notices for false information in the past, and it still doesn’t. When asked how many recipients, like Kartch, have received incorrect letters and thus incorrect benefits because of Beacon, DTA spokesperson Richard Powers replies, "There is no post-Beacon notice-error tracking, just as there was none prior to Beacon." However, the federal government mandates that mistakes, such as underpaid or overpaid benefit checks, be tallied in food-stamp cases. If this narrow measure is any indication, Kartch’s experience probably isn’t unusual. According to federal statistics, the DTA’s error rate for food-stamp cases hovered at 8.5 percent in 2000. From January to September 2001, before Beacon was fully implemented, it averaged 8.2 percent. Yet it shot up to 9.1 percent by the end of 2001. Two sources close to the DTA’s quality-control unit, which tracks food-stamp-case errors on a regular basis, have told the Phoenix that estimates for January and February of 2002 range from 17 to 20 percent.

Meanwhile, one study conducted at the DTA's Holyoke office last April suggests that the burden has fallen not only on recipients, but also on social workers. An unofficial time study, obtained by the Phoenix, found that it took the average social worker 30 percent longer to do his or her job since Beacon was implemented. And, says the study, that figure only reflects those moments when the system "is working reasonably well." The study showed routine procedures like food-stamp and teen-parent applications taking even longer.

For DTA social workers, nearly half of whom have volunteered to work up to two weeks without pay to help save the agency $1.1 million this fiscal year, these findings translate into a considerable loss of services to clients. As Rocchi explains, "Beacon is so difficult that, after we give clients checks, we don’t have time to help them." Put another way, it means a greater load for department staff, which just lost 300 people due to early-retirement and budget-tightening efforts. In other words, it means an overall strain in an already-strained environment. Given all this, says Ken Ramsay, of the Local 509 Service Employees International Union (SEIU), which represents 1300 DTA social workers and supervisors, "Beacon is a waste. If the state’s spending this much money on a computer, at least make sure the thing works."

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Issue Date: March 14 - 21, 2002
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