The General Services Administration mishandled an Army childcare subsidy program, creating a backlog in subsidy processing that caused some military families to lose jobs, according to an inspector general’s report issued Sept. 8. The program also experienced at least two data breaches, potentially compromising information of the families involved.
The report outlines GSA’s apparent management of the Army’s Fee Assistance Program, which provides the families of service members subsidies to help pay for childcare when federal care is unavailable.
The program initially provided subsidies and caseworker support to 200 Army families, but a 2014 expansion swelled the eligible Army families to 9,000, quickly overwhelming GSA’s ability to process the subsidies and creating a backlog.
Resource: Read the full report.
“As a result of the planning and process failures outlined in this report, Army families participating in the program experienced inadequate customer service and substantial processing delays,” the report said. “Customer phone calls went unanswered and voice messages were ignored and deleted. GSA took up to seven months to process some subsidy applications. Families have reported severe financial and other hardships resulting from the processing delays.”
The expansion was initially part of a plan to transfer program operations from GSA to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, but a growing backlog derailed the initial hand-off target of March 2015.
As a result, the transfer has been postponed while GSA officials work to whittle down a raft of unprocessed requests.
Expansion explosion
The program was initially for families enrolled in federal childcare centers, with subsidies covering the costs off-site care when on-site wasn’t available. In all, Army families accounted for 200 of the 1,400 total families covered for subsidies by the GSA.
In April 2014, GSA opened coverage to Army families using private childcare facilities, swelling enrollment to 9,000 eligible families.
But a lack of IT infrastructure slowed the processing of claims, with only 10 contractors allotted to handle applications. By October 2014, the report states that 2,100 actions remained unprocessed and 800 emails went unanswered.
The program operated on a cloud email application system and claims were processed on spreadsheets, but neither program was adequate to handle the influx of demand.
The report said that former GSA CFO Michael Casella told the OIG that there was not “‘good communication’ between the senior executive director in Washington, DC and the Kansas City onsite division director,” when the expansion agreement was signed, therefore hampering the development of an adequate IT system to process the demand.
Transfer interrupted
By February 2015, then Deputy Administrator Denise Turner Roth reported to the OIG that the unprocessed family actions had reached 5,300 and that the planned transfer to USDA, slated for March 31, was now unrealistic.
By March, GSA had upped the staff tasked with processing the actions to 85 contractors, but by that point, the backlog had reached more than 11,000 unprocessed actions, unreturned phone calls and unanswered emails combined.
The report also found that in April, in the rush to bring on more processing staff, contractors had access to sensitive information about Army families before completing required background checks, training and non-disclosure agreements.
A litany of hardships
By the end of July, the backlog of unprocessed items totaled 25,900, including 9,100 unpaid invoices.
As a result, the report notes instances of hardship reported by Army families, including: one soldier who reported filing for bankruptcy, another who had the unpaid fees referred to a collection agency, a soldier’s spouse who faced the need to leave school in order to care for the family’s children and another spouse on the verge of losing a job.
By June 2015, another information breach occurred when 200-credentialed GSA personnel had potential unauthorized access to the information of 8,000 families.
The report recommended establishing benchmarks and implementation strategies to eliminate the backlog, as well as an agreed plan to transfer the program to USDA.
GSA noted in the report that it had established benchmarks, but the Army had yet to agree to them. It also noted that increased staff had helped nearly double the average of family actions processed in a day compared to its March completion rate.
GSA has also reduced its unanswered emails from more than 4,000 on July 31 to 621 on Sept. 2 and said it has plans to eliminate the backlog by the end of the year.
