State Computer Is Fixable, Panel Told

SACRAMENTO — State legislators probing a trouble-plagued statewide computer network to track deadbeat parents heard assurances Tuesday that the system is fixable, but also warnings that further “undiscovered problems” lie ahead.

The price tag for the computer system was originally estimated at $99 million. As recently as last week, officials said it would cost $260 million. But at Tuesday’s hearing, state officials raised the estimate to $305 million. The state already has paid $82 million of that steadily rising cost.

Members of an Assembly committee at the informational hearing were clearly skeptical that the State Automated Child Support System would ever work as intended, but made no immediate move to recommend scrapping the system.

But Capitol sources familiar with the string of troubles that has bedeviled the project for six years predicted that there would soon be an open bipartisan revolt against a further investment of state funds.

Created in response to federal requirements for using computers to trace parents, mostly fathers, who fail to make child support payments, California’s system remains inoperable in all but one of 23 counties where it was installed and unwanted in others familiar with the problems.

The consultant hired to investigate those problems, Logicon Inc., has reported finding 1,400 glitches in the system’s software alone.

“Technically,” Logicon project manager Ronald Modes testified Tuesday, the system can be salvaged. But further “undiscovered problems” lie ahead as more counties try to use it, an earlier report by the consultant predicted.

Troubles with the child support tracking system represent the second computer debacle for the state in recent years. A $50-million system set up for the Department of Motor Vehicles was abandoned in 1994.

Of the present system--described as the largest state-run computer network in the country--sentiment on the committee ranged from a reluctant acknowledgment that the state was stuck with it to some veiled optimism that it eventually would work.

“We’re too far down the road to trash this thing,” said Assemblywoman Dion Aroner (D-Berkeley), despite the system’s reputation for losing data or not functioning.

Assemblywoman Elaine White Alquist (D-Santa Clara), the chairwoman of the Assembly Committee on Televising the Assembly and Information Technology, concluded the session Tuesday saying that, despite her doubts, “I have hope coming out of this meeting.”

The committee was to convene again after another report, due June 10, by the Logicon consultants.

Actually scrapping the contract with the system provider, Lockheed Martin IMS, would be up to the state Department of Information Technology.

John Thomas Flynn, the department’s chief information officer, said that much of the problem encountered in deploying the system was the fault of the federal government for insisting that California conform to models in other states.

But he too said that if problems persist with the Lockheed system, “we’ll have to take some serious action.”