COMPLAINTS LIKE Ramsay’s have dogged the DTA administration almost from the moment it unveiled what it hailed as a state-of-the-art system last August. Yet over at the DTA’s Washington Street headquarters, in Boston, officials aggressively defend Beacon to the point of celebration.
On a recent March morning, James Reen, the DTA assistant commissioner for systems, set out to make the case for Beacon, dismissing all criticism as "rhetoric." Among agency social workers, he’s considered Beacon’s most vocal cheerleader. He holds court in a small, nondescript conference room, presenting to the Phoenix slides of data about the system while extolling its virtues. Joining him are two other techies: Russell Murray, who heads DTA technical operations; and Steve Judge, whom workers dub the "Father of Beacon" because he’s managed the project almost since its conception, in 1992. Brightly colored charts, graphs, and arrows flash onto a projection screen. As Reen narrates — noting Beacon’s "architecture," its "open and extensible" software, its varied "functionalities" — Murray and Judge glance at the screen, then at an observer, then at the screen, as if waiting for people to comprehend how fabulous this technology is.
Clearly, Beacon represents a source of pride for DTA administrators. At one point during his presentation, Reen announces, "We have a premier system here. We’re thrilled with it. Absolutely thrilled."
It’s not hard to see why Reen and colleagues embrace this technology. The software program has rid the DTA of its antiquated methods; indeed, up until last year, pen and paper were the most sophisticated tools used by department social workers. When interviewing a client, they would record information on paper; later, data-entry specialists would retype the information into an automated mainframe. By contrast, Beacon lets social workers do everything on their computers, cutting out the second step. It is designed as an "interactive interview" — meaning that workers can process client applications and other case files electronically. Beacon calculates benefits such as cash assistance and food stamps. It tracks clients’ paths into the working world. It schedules appointments, issues day-care vouchers, and sends notices informing recipients of benefit changes. Officials maintain that the program is so refined it can determine whether people are, in fact, eligible for assistance in the first place. All in all, they claim, it has eased the paper flow and forever changed how DTA does business. Says Judge, "This technology brought us to the 21st century. It will take us into the future."
The system’s complexity has so far made for a long, arduous journey. Following the DTA’s decision to automate, it took three years (from 1992 to 1995) even to begin building the network. Officials blame that delay on federal and state funding procedures, which require a detailed development plan. To secure $31 million in federal funds, the DTA had to create certain software features as well. The agency carried out a complicated search for a private vendor to design Beacon, ultimately hiring Chicago-based Andersen Consulting in 1995. But within 12 months, the company quit. To date, its departure seems a sore spot. When asked why Andersen abandoned the effort, Reen replies, "There were a lot of reasons. Suffice it to say, we realized continuing the relationship wasn’t going to lead us where we wanted to go. That’s about all I’m going to say."
After vacating the Andersen contract, the DTA, which currently boasts a 225-employee technology division, took over the effort. By 1998, six years after Beacon was conceived, its first phase — the component that monitors job-training and employment issues, as required under welfare-reform law — went live. It would be another four years before the rest of the system came online. Initially, employees say, the DTA administration had slated the network’s launch for 2000. When that didn’t happen, they were told that Beacon would be fully functional by February 2001. Implementation dates kept getting pushed back. In the meantime, employees had to undergo rigorous training: agency social workers devoted one workday a week to learning Beacon. Officials contend they meant to roll out Beacon in increments. Deciding when to introduce Beacon, Judge recognizes, "was one of the controversies." "People were saying, ‘The system doesn’t work,’" he notes. "They were right; it wasn’t all there."
Despite all the delays, officials insist Beacon is worth it. According to the DTA, from August 2001 to February 2002, the computer issued 600,000 notices to 160,000 Massachusetts families, accounting for approximately 1.5 million benefit distributions, with a total value of $300 million. In effect, it has processed from 2000 to 15,000 cases a week, for an average of 6000 cases a day. "That’s a phenomenal rate," Reen says. He then sums up the sentiment at headquarters: "Beacon is a success. That’s the untold story."
OUTSIDE DTA HEADQUARTERS, however, employees paint a different picture. In general, critics of the network — most of whom deal with clients or supervise cases — complain that Beacon has wreaked havoc in the workplace. Sometimes, social workers arrive at the office to find that Beacon has crashed. The network fails for hours and even days at a time. Last November, it remained down for an entire week. Although DTA administrators acknowledge several "hellish" weeks during which the system didn't work, they maintain that on average it is down just nine percent of the time. But when Beacon grinds to a halt, workers say they cannot get anything done because the agency has become so dependent on the computer system. "We can talk to clients," explains Rocchi, the veteran employee in Greenfield. "But we cannot authorize a check, or sign someone up for a training program, or even change an address." During these periods, he and his co-workers have had to return to paper applications. Once Beacon is fixed, they must re-enter the information all over again.
Even when the system is up and running, things aren't necessarily improved. The software program has made simple tasks far more laborious, critics argue. To fill out the average application for, say, cash assistance, social workers must navigate through at least 60 fields’ worth of information. More complicated cases, such as those involving teen parents, can send them slogging through as many as 159 fields. As a result, documents that once took 10 minutes to complete now take more than an hour, workers say. One seasoned employee in the Fall River office boasts that he used to finish an application in "10 minutes — with my eyes closed." That application consisted of six to eight typewritten pages. Yet if you were to print its Beacon counterpart, it would total 30 or so pages. "I’ve gotten [the process] down to 30 minutes," the worker adds, "but that’s only when Beacon is running nicely."
Ken Ramsay, of Local 509, concurs: "It’s horrendous." Ramsay also works as a social worker in the Fall River office. There, he says, Beacon has not only consumed the workday, but also has overshadowed the human element of social work. When clients seek relief, he explains, "The first thing a case worker thinks is, ‘Oh, Christ. Here’s another recipient who has to go through Beacon.’" Workers, in essence, have found themselves reduced from professionals helping the state’s most vulnerable families to data-entry specialists. "It’s a cold process for clients," he adds. "They want a worker who listens to their stories, not [one] focused on a computer."
One of the biggest gripes about Beacon has to do with what Rocchi describes as "faults" — problems that don’t make sense and can’t be fixed without an overhaul. For instance, workers have had to lie to the computer so they can deliver basic services. Rocchi has tried to provide day-care vouchers to mothers who line up jobs but who haven’t started them yet — something allowed under current regulations. Beacon, however, won’t issue the referrals. So Rocchi has become accustomed to fudging information. "If I tell the computer my client starts work today, I get a voucher," he explains. Yet there is danger to such shortcuts in the long run, he notes: "Putting misinformation in the system will cause more problems down the road."
Software glitches and bugs can render the system useless, too. According to numerous workers, Beacon tends to merge households together for no apparent reason, resulting in incorrect benefit calculations and service vouchers. People from welfare cases that were closed as far back as 1989 have mysteriously shown up in active files. Members in one family have mistakenly appeared in another’s documentation. One DTA worker and union official in the Lawrence region — who, like most employees interviewed for this article, asked to remain anonymous for fear of retaliation ("I know how vindictive the DTA administration can be") — remembers the day last month when a young, homeless woman applied for cash assistance. The woman, a screaming baby in tow, had just gotten kicked out of her mother’s home. So the worker tried to secure a place for her in an area shelter — but Beacon kept asking about her mother, a former welfare recipient. "This non-working computer tells you this woman belongs in somebody else’s case," the worker complains. "You have to keep your client calm while this computer requests crazy information that has nothing to do with her." Rather than struggle with the system, the worker wrote his client a shelter voucher by hand and sent her on her way.
And then there are the bizarre notices Beacon has sent clients. Workers describe what they call "hellish" situations, in which recipients, like Kartch, demand to know why they haven’t any benefits, even though their notices state the opposite. Or they want to know why the notice indicates that their case will close, even though they have followed all the requirements. Or why the notice says that their benefit amount has increased when, in reality, it has decreased.
"These horror stories happen all the time," says one worker in a Boston field office. His worst nightmare took place last December, when a disabled woman who collects welfare and food stamps for herself and her two children appeared at his desk. She couldn’t figure out why her grant had decreased. The worker investigated: he checked the grant according to Beacon, then compared it with her old files. He discovered that Beacon had eliminated her son. The DTA owed his client $775 in benefits for four months. "I spent half a day undoing what the computer had done," the worker concludes, "and it’s happened more than once."
