State Admits Computer Woes as Penalty Deadline Nears
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SACRAMENTO — Even as the state faces $4 billion in potential penalties for its failure to computerize child support collections, officials admitted to legislators Thursday that they are still months away from even having a plan in place for completing the system required by federal welfare reforms.
John Thomas Flynn, director of the Department of Information Technology, acknowledged that it would take until January for the state and Lockheed Martin IMS, the contractor on the project, to prepare a plan for correcting glitches in the system and extending it statewide.
“The system we have now does not work,” he said.
But he said it was extremely unlikely that federal officials would impose penalties against the state and place thousands of poor families at risk of losing their welfare payments.
The federal government, which has invested millions in the system, had set an Oct. 1 deadline for the state to complete the project. Under the welfare reform act passed last year, any state that fails to meet the deadline could face the loss of all federal welfare funds. For California, that would mean the forfeiture of a $3.7-billion block grant.
Leora Gershenzon, an attorney for the National Center for Youth Law, predicted that the computerization would not be completed at least until 2000.
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