The California Department of Social Services is preparing to procure a $10.5 million administrative system for processing counties' claims.
Called the County Expense Claim Reporting Information System (CECRIS), the IT modernization was originally approved in 2007, but was put on hold in 2014 to allow the Department of Social Services to re-evaluate the project. The new system will replace two existing legacy systems, the County Expense Claim (CEC) and County Assistance Claim (CA 800) systems.
"It is billions of dollars that go through these two systems. It is really critical we replace them because of all those hand operations that are done outside, and that will allow us to actually do a much better job of monitoring these accounts and spending, and providing the federal government with the assurances that they need that we're claiming appropriately," a Department of Social Services official told a legislative budget committee on April 28.
According to a project report finalized in January, the procurement is scheduled to advance beginning this summer. Design and development would occur in 2017-18, and the full roll-out would commence in 2019.
"After SPR [Special Project Report] 1 was approved in 2012, further analysis determined the costs of its recommended commercial-off-the-shelf/modified-off-the-shelf (COTS/MOTS) solution would have more realistically been $14.8 million, versus the $7.7 million originally estimated in SPR 1, and the project timeline would have been about a year longer. Although the total project cost is $10.6 million in SPR 2 (leverages existing enterprise components), which is moderately higher than SPR 1, it is more cost-effective than the $14.8 million price tag of the COTS/MOTS solution," the 2016 report says.
The CEC system, built atop solutions released in 1997, processes about $8 billion in claims for county welfare departments; CA 800 is used by county welfare departments to claim reimbursement for assistance costs paid to beneficiaries of public assistance programs such as CalWORKS and CalFRESH.
