$6 Million

I liked to save the State money. It was something concrete I could take credit for. I got the opportunity to brag a bit in April 1976 when my boss, Don Czinder, said that he was putting together some material to show the Legislature that we – the Division of Administrative Procedures – were necessary. In a 4/6/76 memo, I listed 4 instances in which we had saved the State money:

1. Over $5 million was saved in just 10 months after a procedure was devised to keep a last check from reaching an ADC family after its case was closed. (I gave partial credit for coming up with the solution to Jerry Wingeart. If that name sounds familiar, it is because in January 2002, he was sentenced to life in prison for the 1973 murder of a 20-year old woman from Chesaning.)

2. We tracked down a computer glitch that was causing payments to start earlier than intended for certain new cases. We figured the extra payments had been going out for 5 months at a cost of $15,000 a month.

3. By tightening up some edits on the initial payment effective date for ADC cases, we stopped another source of extra payments. I figured they amounted to over $4000 a month and had been going on for at least 8 years. As far back as April 1972 I had suspected that these extra payments were occurring. In a 4/26/72 memo, I asked my boss if he though something should be done about it. Apparently, he didn’t. It didn’t get fixed until December 1974.

4. Investigating reports of cases remaining open that were supposed to have been closed, we found that all “negative actions” (case closures, grant reductions, etc.) for 12/12/75 had failed. Thirty-three of them were ADC closures, and by the time we got them actually closed 2 months later, $25,740 in extra payments had gone out.

In a 7/21/76 memo, I gave staff member Edie Goldman credit for leading a project to automate the “negative action letter”, which was sent when a grant was reduced or a case was closed. This saved the State about $15,000 a month.

Every year or so, the Legislature authorized a cost of living increase for the ADC allowance. This was called a “standards increase” and consisted of a few dollars per person for personal needs (food, clothing and incidentals) and a few more dollars per person for heat and utilities. I don’t know how many times this happened over the years, but until 1973, the changes were done manually by the county caseworkers, case by case. In 1973, I persuaded Department management to partially automate the process. I proposed it in a 8/1/73 memo to my then-boss Dennis DuCap:

Although the ADC update cannot be done in a mass computer update, we could mass update just the personal needs portion by adding $3 per eligible person to each case. This will completely take care of many cases – cases in which there is no allowance for heat or utilities and in which the shelter maximum increase has no effect. Last Friday I examined 166 ADC cases in Ingham County and found that 66 of them (40%) would be affected only by the personal needs increase. In addition, I learned that all multiple-dwelling public housing in Lansing and Flint and an undetermined portion in Detroit include heat and utilities in the rent. Those were the only cities I inquired about.

I conclude from this that by updating personal needs at the state office level, we may be able to cut the number of transactions required by 40%. Workers will still have to examine every ADC case and sort out those that are affected by the increase in the heat and utilities allowances and the shelter ceiling. Cases that are not so affected may then be re-filed, and not re-budgeted until the next routine change or redetermination.

The partial update did cut down on the number of transactions that had to be completed in a window of less than 3 weeks, but it also made the process more complicated, as can be seen from the caseworker instructions I suggested to Murphy Mathews in a 8/7/73 memo.

The reason we couldn’t do the entire standards update centrally is that our computer records did not show if a family paid their heat and utility bills or if they were included in the rent. You would think that Department management would have thought it worthwhile to get the heat and utilities information into the records so the next standards update could be centrally. But for whatever reason, it did not get done.

I didn’t forget about it. In the same appropriations act that included the 1973 standards increase, the Legislature told the Department to send recipients a notice itemizing their budget whenever the grant was changed. My 10/12/73 proposal for the notice included the addition of a heat and utilities code to the ADC computer record. I pointed out that

A side benefit of the system modification is that it will enable the state office to perform just about any kind of standard s update. It is, in effect, “central budget computation.”

The next mention of it that I can find is in an 8/5/76 “Request for Exception” to a hiring freeze. I listed some of the accomplishments of my Systems Analysis Section and then listed some things we could do if we had the staff. One was on-line budget computation:

The section has already identified the data elements required for automated budget computation in CIS. A new DSS-5A, Case Status Notice has been drafted which will contain all the new data fields. The benefits to be derived from this CIS enhancement are:

• Budget calculation free of arithmetic error.

• The ability to update grants . . . centrally when there are changes in ADC standards . . .

• A system-generated budget itemization notice would replace the manually-completed DSS-3449, which is sent by workers there is a change in an ADC family’s basic budgetary allowances . . .

In a 1/18/77 memo, Department director John Dempsey announced his “Plan for Improving Processes and Systems”. He listed 4 major projects he wanted to complete by the end of the year. In a 2/10/77 memo, Chief Deputy Director Paul Allen said that because of the resources needed for the 4 major projects, it was necessary to “curtail” all non-essential changes to CIS. He assigned Denny DuCap the “responsibility to act as a clearing point for all changes to CIS.”

In a 2/2/77 status report for my Systems Analysis Section, I said this about the heat and utilities field:

(I)n order to collect the heat and utilities data on each case before the next standards increase, the new field must be ready for use at least 6 months before December – June 1 at the latest. It is not going to happen unless we can persuade Administration to put it on the Department’s system priority list.

Having the fields on CIS 6 months before the 1977 ADC standards update would eliminate the need for a crash effort to get the information into the system. Workers would enter it when they did routine changes and eligibility determinations. A listing of the few remaining uncoded cases could have been sent out a month before the update, enabling workers to get the data into 100% of the cases.

In a 3/25/77 memo to Don Czinder, Denny denied our request for a heat and utilities code on CIS.

In a 3/29/77 memo, Don asked me to review 6 requests that had been denied. He said “I am particularly concerned about the denial of 06-7699 – Heat and Utilities Code on CIS.” The next day, Don wrote Denny asking that he reconsider his denial of the request for the heat and utilities code.

Finally, the Department management decided it was necessary to consider projects other than Dr. Dempsey’s Big 4. In a 4/21/77 memo, Myrna Goss asked bureaus to send Mr. DuCap “an updated reevaluation of the changes which they would like to see occur on CIS during the remainder of 1977 or in 1978."

I’m sorry that I can’t say what Myrna Goss’ position in the Department was. It has been over 25 years, and although the names are familiar, I cannot picture some of these people. It was a big place. It is possible that we never met. I tended to stay in my office and write memos. Lois Lamont is another one I cannot picture, but I owe her my gratitude. It apparently was she who finally killed the effort to discontinue the diversion of income to legal dependents. And it was she who, in a 5/17/77 memo to Paul Allen, advocated getting utility information on CIS. Allen gave the go-ahead on 5/24/77.

I started writing system specifications. First, I designed a computer report that workers would use to record the heat, utilities, and shelter information. After the information was gathered, the reports would be sent to the Communications Center, where operators at computer terminals would key the data into the system. Next, I re-wrote my earlier specifications for the heat and utilities code, adding fields for the shelter (rent) amount and an “over-ceiling shelter” indicator. Those requests were submitted 6/21 and 6/22 respectively. Later, I wrote a CIS Bulletin explaining how the report and the new codes were to be used.

On 6/29, I wrote a frantic memo to Denny DuCap saying that according to my calculations, BuMIS didn’t have enough terminal operators to enter the 195,000 transactions in one week. He pointed out that we had 3 weeks, not one week, and BuMIS was confident the they could get the job done.

Although there were several computer systems analysts in the Department, the responsibility for writing the specifications for the standards increase fell on me. I had a bachelor’s degree in Spanish and no training in computers or programming. I did have some experience, however. I had written the specifications for a few previous mass file updates, including one that reduced grants to reflect an increase in social security benefits.

On September 6, I delivered the specifications. They provided the logic for calculating the increased grants for ADC and S (Cuban Relief) cases as well as the reductions in Food Stamps allowances resulting from the grant increases. Steve Craun, the programmer to whom the project was assigned, told me later that my specifications translated easily to Cobol.

The standards increase was a success. The total monthly allowance was increased by $2.5 million. As I explained in a “Review and Analysis” that I made sure a lot of people saw, the increase was complete for 84.4% of the cases. The rest were updated for personal needs only because no heat and utilities information was present for them. Doing the increase centrally for all cases could have saved nearly $6 million. That didn’t happen because the heat and utilities information was missing in 14.8% of the cases, and that was because Department management gave other projects priority over this one. We didn’t get started soon enough. As a consequence, we only saved $5 million.

In a November 4 newsletter, the Department proclaimed that the project had saved $5 million. That is about $18.5 million in 2010 dollars.