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Saturday, May 27, 2006
Ind. Gov't. - Slowing the FSSA privatization train
"Slowing the privatization train" is the headline to an excellent editorial this morning in the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette:
The speeding freight train that was to deliver the Family and Social Services Administration’s entire eligibility operation to a private contractor by July 5 seems to have hit the uphill side.Dogged by reports of the past problems of vendors bidding on the project and questions about FSSA Secretary Mitch Roob’s past relationship to one of the companies, agency officials have rightly decided to take their time in naming a vendor.
“This is such a big contract, we want to make sure we do it exactly right,” FSSA spokesman Dennis Rosebrough said.
Shouldn’t that go without saying? With the well-being of hundreds of thousands of poor Hoosiers and $1 billion in state money on the line, patience is not so much a virtue as a necessity.
Rosebrough also insisted that the well-publicized problems of agency suitors Accenture LLP and IBM, and Roob’s status as a former executive at ACS, one of IBM’s bidding partners, played no part in the decision to slow down the process.
If Accenture’s misadventure in Texas didn’t give FSSA officials pause, it should have.
Texas legislators threatened to fire Accenture and bar the company from other contracts after serious problems developed in its benefit-eligibility system. Accenture has also lost contracts in other states. And ACS lost part of a Georgia contract two years ago because of problems processing claims.
One part of doing a contract exactly right is seeking meaningful public comment well before it’s signed. The original schedule set a public hearing one day after the contract was to be finalized and five days before it was to be signed – all over the July Fourth holiday.
Another part is making a serious attempt to learn from the mistakes of others, and there are plenty of mistakes to be studied. Agency officials should try to find out what went wrong in Texas – and what if anything went right. FSSA’s existing contracts should be carefully evaluated to determine how they affected clients.
Some FSSA caseworkers fear that moving to an automated system and severing the close ties between clients and their caseworkers will effectively shut many elderly, mentally ill and troubled clients who depend on their caseworkers out of the system.
Their superiors need to listen to them.
The agency has no business delegating its most important function – determining who is eligible for food stamps, Temporary Assistance to Needy Families, Medicaid and other programs – to a for-profit company. But if the privatization train has already left the station, the needs of the people the agency serves should be the priority.
And the only way to do that is to take the time to understand those needs.
Posted by Marcia Oddi on May 27, 2006 06:57 AM
Posted to Indiana Government