A new system meant to streamline how low-income Oregonians get help paying for necessities such as medicine, food and health care could create headaches for case workers and clients when it goes live next year, found a state audit released Wednesday.

State auditors said officials at the Department of Human Services and the Oregon Health Authority have planned well for the rollout of their joint one-stop system to sign up for the Oregon Health Plan, food stamps, day care subsidies and other social service programs. But the new audit pointed to a handful of execution issues that could impact vulnerable Oregonians who rely on the safety net. The review also raises questions about how state officials plan to correct erroneous information that could throw off the correct amount of assistance people receive each month.

Tony Black, the project’s manager, responded to the findings in a formal letter to auditors and assured them the state is addressing the problems and has made some fixes already.

The centralized system to determine whether individual Oregonians are eligible for benefits has been years and $510 million in the making. It’s supposed to make it easier for people to receive the help they qualify for. Instead of going to one office to sign up for Oregon Health Plan coverage and a different agency to sign up for cash assistance, people will submit a single application. Day care vouchers, food stamps and other social services programs tied to income, age and disability status will also be covered through that application process.

Oregon’s safety net holds a vital role in the state’s economy. The state provided $13 billion in assistance in the state’s 2018 fiscal year, according to Wednesday’s audit.

The new eligibility system is set to start this spring in Jackson and Josephine counties in Southern Oregon and reach all parts of the state by November 2020.

Signing up through the new system is complex. An auditor watched a case worker go through the step-by-step process and reported it took nearly three hours. It only ended because after 2 hours and 44 minutes, they encountered a “technical issue” and could not proceed.

The state has 153 employees and 300 contractors working to launch the system. In order for the system to work, it must correctly import data from several existing databases that each track information for a single program, such as the Oregon Health Plan.

The state received the framework for the new central system for free from the state of Kentucky. Experts had to figure out how to accurately send all of the state’s existing data from separate databases to the new unified system. They also had to navigate how the new system would handle conflicting information about the same person. For example, one person may have two different income figures listed in two different state databases.

Fixing the data requires human input.

The audit found that the project managers hadn’t forecast how much extra staff time might be required to manually correct erroneous information. Failing to accurately forecast the time-suck ahead of time could lead to long wait times for Oregonians once the system goes live, the audit found.

“For a new application, this could entail filling out hundreds of data fields across dozens of different screens,” the audit said. “Manual data entry is time consuming and could potentially take over an hour per case.”

Auditors estimated the extra work could require 11 to as many as 191 more positions.

Staffers behind the scenes have been testing the new system to make sure the converted data matches up with what’s reflected in the old system. But the auditors found that those tests have some faults. For example, the test would show that someone’s mailing address converted correctly if that field in the new system was not empty. It wouldn’t analyze the mailing address itself for errors.

In about half of cases, the trial runs have also turned up a “benefits mismatch” that gives conflicting figures for how much in, say, food stamps a household qualified for, possibly caused by income figures that conflict from database to database, the audit found. Instead of addressing the differences now, DHS and OHA officials decided to wait until the new system goes live to review individual cases and to notify affected individuals.

The audit said that policy carries minimal risk, “as long as those exceptions are tracked and remediated later.” In his response to the audit, Black said his team has created a single document to track those cases.

Neither he nor the audit addresses how officials will rectify the issues once the system goes live, and whether people will be on the hook to pay back overpaid benefits that went uncorrected.

The audit also found some preparation steps didn’t meet industry standards, specifically security protocols to share sensitive data and provisions in the state’s contract with the firm helping to integrate the system, Deloitte.

Black said his team has implemented plans to address all the issues raised by the audit by the end of December, well ahead of the system’s Southern Oregon launch in April.

-- Molly Young

myoung@oregonian.com