"The system is ineffective, and it's not working. It's as simple as that," Gilpin County Commissioner Jeanne Nicholson said. "The state has stayed in a defiant state of denial."
Counties worry that they'll have to reimburse the federal government millions of dollars in overpayments to the needy, and some lawmakers are so concerned they called a hearing on the matter today.
The $223-million system was designed to replace the 25-year-old Legacy system and streamline food stamps, Medicaid and Temporary Aid to Needy Families.
But it has denied benefits to thousands of qualified clients, and has been maddeningly slow, hard to operate and labor-intensive.
More than two years after its rollout, the Colorado Benefits Management System still is causing major headaches, say counties. Among them:
• It's generating over 11,000 notices of overpayments to clients every month.
• Training for county human services workers has been inadequate.
• The time needed to enter a case into the system has doubled to more than an hour.
• Workers must plow through an excessive number of error-prone, complex screens and decision tables to determine a client's eligibility. To work around the faulty system, they must thumb through seven thick manuals that contain more than 6,000 guidelines and procedures.
Counties have been forced to shell out tens of thousands of dollars to hire additional workers. The state has kicked in more than $9 million.
Owens did not respond to a request for comment.
Dan Hopkins, a former Owens spokesman, said he will not get into "the business of commenting every time someone brings up Owens, positively or negatively."
"To do so only invites a continuing and unproductive dialogue," he said.
The biggest concern to counties is an estimated $98 million to $120 million in overpayments to clients, which have occurred mainly in the food stamp program.
CBMS frequently miscalculates those benefits, or in some cases, denies benefits, they say. It spits out notices to clients that they are receiving excess payments, but doesn't indicate how much or what they are to do about it.
Arapahoe, Boulder, Denver, Gilpin and Weld county officials worry that the excessive overpayments will eventually prompt an audit by the federal government, which may seek to collect millions of dollars from them.
"The taxpayers deserve better accountability," Arapahoe County Commissioner Susan Beckman said. "It's unacceptable to have this kind of government waste."
Roxane White, executive director of the Denver Department of Human Services, said that all counties have problems with CBMS.
"One of our workers will testify about how even an experienced, well-trained worker struggles to keep up with the massive changes in CBMS," White said.
Beckman and Boulder County Commissioner Tom Mayer said they are speaking out now because of the potential magnitude of the overpayments.
They put faith in Karen Legault Beye, Gov. Bill Ritter's new pick to run the state Human Services Department, which oversees CBMS.
"We need to tackle CBMS," Beye said. "The overpayments need to be addressed. We need to stop the bleeding."
John Witwer, former CBMS director appointed by Owens, defends the Owens administration, and says his staff worked overtime to fix the beleaguered computer system.
"This was a complex project. It had many stakeholders," Witwer said. "There has been a significant amount of success in making the system function and more user-friendly."
Witwer added that the last remaining issue to be solved is the suspected overpayments.
White praised Witwer's work.
"I think the state is taking the challenges very seriously at this time," she said. "The office of CBMS under Dr. Witwer and Gov. Owens also worked very hard to create improvements. It has been steady progress, but we have a long way to go."
Months after CBMS suffered a bumpy start, Owens appointed Deloitte & Touche Consulting to conduct an audit.
It found that no single person was accountable for CBMS. Two departments - Human Services and Health Care Policy and Financing - help design CBMS, but the department heads lacked computer expertise, the audit found.
Some lawmakers worry Ritter's administration is being saddled with a number of flubbed computer conversions.
"We're being handed a house of cards . . . and it's going start unraveling real quickly," said JBC member Rep. Jack Pommer, D-Boulder. "For instance, we have tens of millions of dollars that we're going to have to pay back to the federal government, because the former governor made a decision that we're going to implement a computer system that wasn't ready to go."
He and Sen. Bob Hagedorn, D-Aurora, accused the Owens administration of hiding "screw-ups over the past eight years."
Witwer suggested that some critics are simply taking cheap shots for partisan reasons.
Counties' and Democratic lawmakers' renewed push for an investigation and independent audit of CBMS comes after a bipartisan committee from Colorado Counties Inc., released a scathing report on the computer.
The report estimated that CBMS is generating an average of 11,300 notices of overpayments monthly.
Boulder County has had to hire 10 new caseworkers to administer CBMS, increasing its costs annually by $500,000, Boulder County Commissioner Tom Mayer said.
"We all are being left with the tab for something that doesn't work, and it's an embarrassment," he said.
The state's largest counties primarily lay blame at the foot of the former head of Human Services, Marva Livingston Hammons.
"All she did was deny there was a problem and blamed the counties," Mayer said.
Hammons could not be reached for comment. She's reportedly no longer in Colorado and has a new job, said Liz McDonough, spokeswoman for Human Services.
Dr. Witwer defended Hammons, saying she was cooperative with the counties on CBMS. Witwer and McDonough, in part, blame a 2004 lawsuit for the problem.
A court order prohibited counties from recouping overpayments made to clients who received welfare benefits between September 2004 and June 2006, creating a backlog, said McDonough.
Counties and the state are now working together to determine what factors have caused the suspected $98 million in overpayments.
The contributing factors could be CBMS, caseworker error at the county level, client mistakes or fraud.
Counties say the state's solution is to have counties try to collect millions in overpayments from Colorado's poor and most vulnerable population.
They say it will take at least 180 new full-time employees.
"We're not a collection agency," Nicholson said.
Meanwhile, Witwer blames the legislature, in part, for the glitches dogging CBMS.
In 1998, the state received bids of up to $400 million to design CBMS with the bells and whistles needed to create a user-friendly, one-touch system. The state hit financial hard times and scaled back the project to $92 million.
Meanwhile, Hagedorn, who is spearheading an investigation, alleges that Owens' administration made it difficult for lawmakers and others working to improve CBMS to get to the bottom of the problems.
Hagedorn said he plans to introduce a whistle-blower bill in coming weeks to protect county workers from future political backlash.
"I've been personally told by clerks that Owens cracked down and said he better not see any negative comments about CBMS," Hagedorn said. "If he did, there would be payback."
Witwer said he wasn't aware of any such threats of retaliation.
"I can't be 100 percent (sure), but if that happened it was not a pattern," he said. Nonetheless, Witwer acknowledged that some of the criticism lodged by the counties is fair.
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