Four years ago, Texas embarked on the nation's most ambitious plan to privatize enrollment in social services. It would establish call centers to take food stamp, welfare and Medicaid applications by phone, fax, Internet and mail, instead of just in person at state offices. It would use a new Web-based computer system designed to bring Texas into the Internet age.

Today, the project is in shambles. The state has canceled the call center contract with a group led by Accenture LLP and continues to do most of the enrollment work with state employees using the old computer system.

Indeed, in some ways, the endeavor has come full circle, with Texas re-hiring Deloitte Consulting LLP this month to maintain the computer system, TIERS, which the company developed for the state starting in 2001.

The cost of the projects so far: more than $500 million. That does not include the amount the state has spent doing business the old way in the meantime. Just running the mainframe of the old computer system, known as SAVERR, costs $1 million a month, officials say.

And it's not just about money.

Many Capitol staffers have come to know Devante Johnson by name. He is a 14-year-old Houston boy who died in March from kidney cancer. He went without health insurance — and consequently treatment for his tumors — for four months because of numerous problems with the enrollment system. He has come to symbolize the red tape Texas families face applying for benefits.

Who's to blame?

Some are pointing to Gov. Rick Perry's Health and Human Services executive commissioner, Albert Hawkins, who oversaw the projects. Others say the Legislature bears responsibility for a plan that was flawed from the start, attempting too much, too fast.

The chairman of a Senate panel considering Hawkins' reappointment said he expects the committee to approve the executive commissioner today.

Sen. Mike Jackson, R-La Porte, said he has been holding off on a vote since Hawkins' appearance before the panel in February because he wanted to try to get a unanimous vote. He said he doesn't expect that to happen, but he's confident Hawkins will get a nod from a majority. The nomination would then go to the full Senate.

Jackson said Hawkins is performing well in a very tough job.

Meanwhile, some lawmakers are pushing social services proposals that seek to prevent a repeat of what supporters of children say was a disaster.

"House Bill 2292 set up expectations that were too quick and a lack of legislative oversight that was devastating," state Rep. Patrick Rose said of the 2003 legislation establishing the call centers.

Rose, D-Dripping Springs, who voted against that legislation and who now is chairman of the House Human Services Committee, has filed proposals that would increase legislative oversight of the call centers and TIERS and establish an independent review process. Rose said he'd like to see increased reliance on state employees to enroll Texans in social services programs and decreased involvement — though not an elimination — of private contractors.

He has also proposed giving the Health and Human Services Commission's office of inspector general more autonomy.

The committee could vote on the proposals this week, Rose said.

As the agency and lawmakers try to figure out what's next, there is still disagreement about what went wrong.

Computer questions

Brian Flood, inspector general for the commission, released a report last week showing that agency officials poorly managed the call centers and TIERS (which is pronounced "teers" and stands for Texas Integrated Eligibility Redesign System). The inspector general is charged with investigating fraud in the agency and prepared the report at senators' request.

Flood conducted tests that showed SAVERR (which stands for System for Application, Verification, Eligibility, Referral and Reporting) outperforms TIERS. The old SAVERR system, Flood found, calculates benefits correctly more often than TIERS, and more quickly.

"Although it must be acknowledged that SAVERR is an outdated system, both objective testing and survey results from subject matter experts indicate that, as of today, SAVERR outperforms TIERS," Flood's report said.

State officials maintain that TIERS works well.

"It already provides benefits to more than 250,000 clients each month, and the system's accuracy has undergone several independent reviews," the agency's official response to Flood's report says. But last week, the agency stopped plans to expand the system beyond its pilot area in Travis, Williamson and Hays counties because it does not meet federal requirements.

Flood found that the Health and Human Services Commission has known for years about serious problems with TIERS.

One glitch identified in 2003 was a lack of an easily accessible, detailed history of each case.

The office of the inspector general needs that information to ensure that the state is not paying too much in federal food stamp benefits, Flood said.

U.S. Department of Agriculture officials told Hawkins in an April 16 letter that they cannot approve expanded use of TIERS because they haven't been able to test the agency's solution to the problem. Hawkins said that fixing the case history problem was "always included as a high priority but not the highest priority." He said the agency refers only one in 1,000 food stamp cases for possible action related to fraud.

The case history issue has still not been fixed, Flood said.

Agency officials said they are developing a solution that should be in place by late June.

It was just one of many defects in TIERS, Flood's report says. By the time the state transferred TIERS from Deloitte to Accenture's Texas Access Alliance in 2005, TIERS had 579 outstanding defects, Flood found.

Hawkins said that number includes duplications and some issues that had been resolved.

Program questions

Flood's report questions the state's commitment to use TIERS in the call centers in the first place.

"The decision was driven, at least in part, by the fact that a large amount of taxpayer dollars had already been invested in TIERS," the report says.

Flood also raises doubts about whether the state was ready to begin the call center pilot in Travis and Hays counties in January 2006. Hawkins did not have access to certain readiness test results when he made the decision to proceed, Flood found.

Agency officials said the project was tested extensively.

"Think of it as a shuttle launch," commission spokeswoman Stephanie Goodman said. "At some point, they roll the shuttle out to the launch pad, but the evaluation of go/no-go decision criteria continues right up until the launch." Immediately before the call center pilot began in Travis and Hays counties, the state released the Texas Access Alliance from a key contract requirement, Flood found.

State officials knew that TIERS, conceived by the Legislature in 1999, was never designed to work in call centers. It was meant for face-to-face meetings.

Accenture, the company hired to run the call centers, planned to use a computer program called MAXe to transfer the data into TIERS. That didn't work. Shortly before the pilot began, Accenture proposed a solution: having workers manually enter data into MAXe and again into TIERS. The commission OK'd the plan.

But the double data entry caused applications to stack up.

"What you get in hindsight is the knowledge that your strategies to resolve the problem did not work," Hawkins said.

In April 2006, USDA officials warned Hawkins that backlogs, long hold times and lack of training at the call centers "is contributing to poor customer service, client frustration and critical system inefficiencies." By May, there was a backlog of 7,200 food stamp applications in the pilot area. That month, Hawkins stopped the pilot.

Meanwhile, state offices had become severely understaffed. That's because the Legislature, expecting the contractor to take over more of the work, had reduced the commission's budget and cut about 4,000 staff positions for the 2007 budget year.

Knowing that their jobs were not secure, about 100 eligibility staffers per month left their jobs between October 2005 and July 2006, according to the Center for Public Policy Priorities, which champions low-income Texans. The state hired temporary workers to replace some, but not all. In May, Hawkins canceled planned layoffs.

Staff shortages, Texas Access Alliance errors and changes in state policies all contributed to a decline in enrollment in the Children's Health Insurance Program and children's Medicaid, advocates say.

Rose said he thinks that if his proposed review process had been in place in January 2006, Hawkins never would have been allowed to proceed with the call center pilot.

Hawkins said, "Certainly we were aware of potential problems. We were given a very direct, challenging task by the Legislature.

"I don't make administrative decisions in a vacuum."

Celia Hagert, a senior policy analyst at the Center for Public Policy Priorities, says Rose's plan could help prevent future disasters.

"Just pointing a finger at Hawkins or firing Accenture is not enough," Hagert said. "We need to pick up the pieces and move forward."