Hawkins Is to Blame
April 18th, 2007 at 7:58 pm
It hasn’t been a good week for Albert Hawkins and his staff at HHSC. The sink hole created by HHSC’s experiments with how poor Texans apply for and receive government benefits seems to be growing by the day. And it promises to worsen tomorrow.
First, as we reported in an earlier post, the federal government refused to provide any more federal money for the problematic TIERS computer software, forcing Hawkins to cancel an ill-advised expansion of the system.
Then, as Quorum Report notes, the speaker and lite gov asked the State Auditor’s Office to conduct a quickie investigation of TIERS.
This afternoon, Hawkins’ own Inspector General released a report that ripped the agency’s handling of TIERS and the Accenture-call center contract. The IG’s deputy chief counsel, Michael Garbarino, gave a briefing on the report’s findings for legislative staffers and reporters. Quorum Report has posted a good summary of the report’s findings and recommendations — many of them mirror our reporting on Accenture and TIERS. The report clearly lays out how HHSC botched these projects, badly.
Finally, a House subcommittee investigating TIERS and the call center projects will present its recommendations tomorrow to the House Human Services Committee. Rep. Abel Herrero (D-Robstown) headed the subcommittee and gave us a sneak preview of his conclusions. Perhaps the juiciest item in his report: HHSC softened and altered an audit by the firm KPMG to make their computer system appear to be in better shape than it actually was. That’s just one example in a long line of incidents in which the agency ignored or covered up signs of problems.
Our reporting shows that Hawkins was warned repeatedly by federal officials and his own auditors about issues with the call centers and with the TIERS software before they were rolled out. Yet Hawkins moved forward anyway. Amazingly, he was still trying to expand TIERS right up until two days ago.
“He had a very hands-on role,” said Garbarino of Hawkins after today’s briefing. Garbarino should know — like us, he’s looked through thousands of pages of agency records dealing with call centers and TIERS that passed through Hawkins’ office. At nearly every stage, Hawkins pushed these projects forward despite overwhelming evidence that they would fail. Those failures robbed thousands of poor families of desperately needed benefits and wasted half-a-billion dollars in taxpayer funds, according to today’s IG report. Ultimately, the blame is his.
April 18th, 2007 at 10:19 pm
They (the commission) are STILL converting cases to TIERS…..Every woman that APPLIES for the new Womens’ Health Program is put into the TIERS BEFORE her eligibility for the program is determined.
As a side note, access to our data entry program Uniscope was taken away from us yesterdy. Only two workers per unit have access to complete what is necessary on cases by data entering them. The commission has a reason that they removed access from all but a few workers. I am not at liberty to throw my thoeries out there, but let’s say that cases CAN be converted from TIERS back to the old reliable system.
April 19th, 2007 at 11:01 pm
[…] had already been a long week for Hawkins and HHSC. You can read our blog posts from yesterday here and here. The focal point of the battle on Thursday was a hearing of the House Human Services […]