By ROGER TALBOT
Sunday News Staff

Laboring with a lame computer system, the state Department of Corrections has done manually for more than two years much of the paperwork that funnels restitution to about 1,100 crime victims, a process that has delayed payments and is expected to continue for about 12 more months.

“It has been interesting,” said Rep. David A. Welch, R-Kingston, whose House Committee on Criminal Justice and Public Safety watches over the DOC. “They went from 20th Century to 18th Century technology. It seems to me they are going in the wrong direction.”

The tale of the recalcitrant computer begins way back in 1997, or early 1998, when corrections officials who have long since left the scene decided to end the practice of leasing time on the computer at the state Department of Health and Human Services to process the $2.5 million in fees, fines and restitution payments collected each year by the DOC’s Division of Field Services, which supervises about 5,000 offenders paroled from prison or serving court-ordered probation.

In September 1998, with $580,000 to spend, the department hired a Florida firm, Computer Management Sciences Inc., to design a program and set up a computer system that would link 11 district offices to field services headquarters in Concord. The plan was to have the system humming by November 1999, long before the Y2K millennium that was predicted to wreak havoc with old computers when Jan. 1, 2000, boggled their internal calendars.

But midway through the work, the Florida firm was purchased by a larger company, Computer Associates, which found itself in unfamiliar computing waters.

“We almost had to go back to square one,” said Larry Blaisdell, director of field services. “It was not so much a problem with the design (of the computer program), but with getting a new company up to speed that had not dealt with this kind of thing before, but that now found it had inherited this contract.”

He recalled there were frustrating meetings where the computer consultant’s representatives “tried to understand our business practices and rules,” and tried to explain the difficulties of designing a computer program to interpret the state’s collection and disbursement needs.

“They tossed out what the original company had done . . . and came up with their own system from scratch,” Blaisdell said.

The state’s collection policies are complicated. An offender pays a monthly fee to the district office, usually $40, for the supervision provided by the parole-probation officers. Some of that fee goes into the state’s general operating fund, but a portion is earmarked for support of Police Standards and Training, the state’s police academy. Now, with no computer to streamline the transfer process, some of the money collected sits in a bank account for up to six months before it is disbursed.

A 17 percent collection fee is added to any court-ordered monthly restitution payments made by an offender. There is a formula that divides the collection fee among the state’s victims compensation fund, the general fund and the Division of Field Services, and the amount collected in restitution is supposed to be disbursed to the victims within 30 days. Restitutions total about $1 million each year.

Blaisdell said payments in about 500 older restitution cases, where the data was entered into the computer at HHS before December 1999, have continued on a monthly basis.

“But we aren’t able to enter new victims onto the old system,” he said of about 600 victims whose restitution payments are being processed manually. The state treasury checks in those cases have been getting to the victims about 60 to 90 days after the money is collected from the offenders.

The bulk of the paperwork that comes in monthly from the district offices has been handled by three staffers — program manager Susan Bedard, case technician Jeanne Stewart and secretary Diane Gagnon — but Blaisdell estimated that up to 40 DOC employees have contributed in various ways to the computer project, putting in a total of about 20,000 hours of work.

The new system is coming together “in parts and pieces,” he said, with the consultant being paid in installments.

“It hasn’t always been a pleasant relationship, but they have stuck with us to work through this,” Blaisdell said.

The next hurdle will be entering data from the old cases into the new system. That should be done by the end of April, he said.

Next will come the information on cases that have been added since December 1999 — thousands of separate computer entries, recording the history of each crime, details on the offenders and the court orders on fees and restitution.

“We see that as a six-month effort. I hope it will be less but it’s a pretty cumbersome process,” Blaisdell said.

“The tech folks tell me we’re probably looking at a year before the system is cutting checks automatically, but it should get easier in the months ahead. This has been a terrible source of frustration to all of us and I know it is to everybody else. It is something that should have been resolved two years ago,” he said.

Rep. Welch said he was disappointed to hear it will probably take another year before the new computer system is functional.

“It’s a long process. You have to test everything. It’s the same as if you were to buy an automobile and you tested every circuit in the car to make sure it works,” Welch said.

“Am I satisfied that it has taken this long? Absolutely not. I would have thought they could have dumped that contractor a long time ago and I don’t know why that wasn’t done,” he said.

The Union Leader

-- Anonymous, March 10, 2002