Records: DHHS downplayed food stamp issues
In July and August, DHHS officials downplayed widespread technical problems with the state's new food stamp system, prompting frustration from social services directors and building up a massive backlog of cases.
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But things were finally starting to look up.
A few days later, something changed.
That's 8.5 percent of the number of clients the state currently serves every month.
"July 15 was a date all of us will remember well," said Tammy Schrenker, president of the N.C. Association of County Directors of Social Services. "Many of us, I dare say all of us, experienced problems with processing food and nutrition services."
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Although county directors and DHHS officials say the issue is now resolved, records show the issues came at a heavy price for case workers and food stamp clients.
Issues escalated with new update
The problems began July 15, when the state added functionality for Medicaid and Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, known as Work First, to the existing NC FAST system.
The update changed the interface and required case workers to enter additional information.
But almost immediately, county social services directors started reporting issues with slow processing, submission failures and cases that disappeared altogether. In emails to each other, they also confirmed the issues were statewide in scope.
In response to questions from the counties, NC FAST IT Director Anthony Vellucci pointed directors to new training guides and said his team was aware of the issues.
That wasn't enough for Robeson County DSS Director Becky Morrow.
In messages to Schrenker, who acted as a liaison between directors and DHHS, county leaders pleaded with the state to publicly acknowledge the technical problems in an effort to relieve the backlash for case workers on the front lines.
Black's audience was disappointed.
With thousands of hungry clients, county agencies held donation drives, issued food vouchers with county money and referred people to food banks. The impact was felt across the state.
According to Alan Briggs, executive director of the N.C. Association of Food Banks, demand increased more than 10 percent from in July, August and September over the previous quarter. It's a spike he called notable even amid the continuously increasing demand of the last few years.
In early August however, Batts told her staff that things may soon get better. Conversation at the state level, she said, was starting to change, and the director's association was again "pushing hard" for a public acknowledgement of the problems.
USDA criticizes NC FAST roll out
North Carolina's social services, which are supervised by the state and administered by each of North Carolina's 100 counties, experienced delayed benefits long before NC FAST. It's just one of the reasons why counties have pushed for years for a more streamlined system.
Even in the new system, not every delay is a result of the switch, said DHHS spokesperson Ricky Diaz.
Food stamp clients, who must recertify for benefits every six months, may not turn in their paperwork on time. Or the county may have fallen behind in entering paper applications into the system.
Although DHHS can make estimations based on the number of potential recertifications expected, these other factors make quantifying the backlog difficult, Diaz said.
"NC FAST can track the cases once paperwork has been keyed into the system," Diaz wrote in an email to WRAL. "There is not a way for NC FAST to get the whole picture and track this information if the paperwork has not yet been processed by the county."
In a letter to Wos noting areas that required "urgent attention from the state," the federal agency wrote that DHHS must confirm the number of backlogged cases and how long they were overdue – something the USDA said the state was so far unable to do.
The letter also noted serious technical issues with NC FAST, which USDA reviewers noticed during their evaluation in mid-August.
"Some of these issues impact all [county] staff and others appear to occur sporadically with varying system functionality available to each worker," USDA Regional Administrator Donald Arnette wrote.
Solution: Better messaging, switch browsers
As Batts' note to her staff indicated, the internal conversation about NC FAST was indeed changing.
Wos was unable to attend the meeting.
More than a month after the system update in mid-July, counties began discussing a possible solution to the freezing, crashing and "white screens" they saw when using NC FAST – switch from Internet Explorer to Google Chrome.
A few days later on Aug. 22, the NC FAST team at DHHS formally notified all counties that making the switch would drastically improve performance.
Given the number of users involved, Schrenker said, it's not surprising that the technical issues took so long to solve.
"There is some validity in saying when you deal with 100 different counties who are in 100 different places, it's very hard to determine what everybody's exact issue," she said.
More challenges lie ahead from federal rules
To reduce that backlog, DHHS deployed a "SWAT team" of state staff to process applications back in Raleigh.
"It appears that counties are pretty well caught up in the sense of getting the benefits to the clients on time," Black, the state social services director, said in an interview last week. "I'm not going to say that every single one, every single case, there might be a few here and there, but we're working with them."
He acknowledged the post-July 15 update was a challenge to case workers in all 100 counties, but he reiterated that county preparedness still had a big impact on the delays.
"I think different counties were in different places on July 14," Black said. "I think different counties responded quicker in getting things back up to speed."
As a former county social services director himself, Black said he knows what it's like to deal with angry clients – he ran into similar issues long before NC FAST. But he pointed to the discovery of the Google Chrome solution as an example of how the state and the counties were on the same page.
"I think what you're trying to get at is, 'Is the state saying one thing and the county saying another?' I think I would respond to that by saying we've all worked very closely together on this," Black said.
Months later, both Batts and Schrenker say the situation is much improved. And although she didn't think the state expected some of the problems it saw after the July 15 update, she said they stemmed from a combination of issues on the state and county level.
"All of us need to take responsibility for these issues and not blame one or another," Schrenker said.
Black said that NC FAST is now working "quite well" and is delivering $200 million in benefits to about 800,000 households a month.
"Where we're at right now is looking ahead and planning ahead and trying to work with our counties in preparing for the next phase of this," Black said.
Those phases will include the full implementation of Medicaid for children and adults as well as changes connected with federal health care reform.
Schrenker said she knows those new stages will pose challenges. But she said she's confident that once NC FAST is fully implemented, it will provide much better service to clients who can talk to one case worker to get all the resources they need.
"We still have good days and bad days in NC FAST," Schrenker said. "What we have to understand is that this is a system we asked for."
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