State social services department prepares for federal certification

After a decade of trouble, no one is saying the state's controversial NOMADS computer will leap gracefully over the hurdle of federal certification.

But state officials say the computer system will nonetheless make a Sept. 30 deadline for complying with federal mandates.

NOMADS administrator Gary Stagliano said reaching the compliance milestone amounts to a triumph in the battle to develop a computer system able to handle federal Social Services and entitlements from welfare to child support enforcement.

But he admitted this is just the first major step.

After that, he said, programmers, the state and the counties will get to work trying to make the trouble-plagued system more usable.

NOMADS began as a noble idea to combine all social services under a single electronic umbrella that could track and manage every benefit, service and program for which an individual or family was eligible.

Driven by federal threats, confused by welfare reform and hampered by programming errors - but always with the promise it could do the job dangling like a carrot just a few million dollars down the road - the project has become Nevada government's worst nightmare and most expensive joke.

From a humble $12 million initial appropriation, its cost has grown to more than $130 million. The most recent chunk was a $24.8 million budget, plus $9 million aimed at specific certification problems, approved by the 1999 Legislature.

The system's most vocal critics are county officials who say the system is actually slowing or preventing them from getting child support checks to custodial parents who need the money. Some like Washoe District Attorney Dick Gammick say NOMADS should be scrapped.

State officials said there was no alternative except to plunge ahead since failure to certify would bring $9 million in fines this year, doubling each year until the system passes federal tests. Throwing the balky system out, they said, could bring a demand to repay the more than $75 million in federal money sunk into the system.

So state and county officials decided to endure the system's complexity, painful slowness, archaic programming and myriad internal problems this year to focus exclusively on federal requirements.

"We pretty much agreed to focus on certification," said Lance Turner, who heads Washoe County's Family Support Division.

State officials told them this week it paid off.

"We still have a few things to accomplish, but we're well into the home stretch," said Chris Apple, who was hired earlier this year specifically to manage the electronics development of NOMADS.

Stagliano, who runs the welfare administration's side of NOMADS, said the letter advising the federal government that Nevada's system is ready will go out in mid-September.

That letter will say all the welfare and child support cases in Nevada are in the system - more than 210,000 of them. It also claims NOMADS now can meet all federal requirements, provide the federal and local jurisdictions all the information needed to manage those cases, and that it can process payments to every client.

To pass certification, federal officials will visit Nevada and put NOMADS through a series of tests.

Stagliano said the field test is "the most important piece" because that will determine whether NOMADS can successfully process benefits to those who deserve and qualify for them.

"We don't have any latitude on that, because you absolutely have to be able to distribute money," he said.

He said federal inspectors should make their first trial run on Nov. 13.

"The second will be sometime in January to give us time to fix anything that might be wrong," he said.

He told the NOMADS Steering Committee the department has been putting the system through the required tests and that it has "passed cleanly."