The Oregon Eligibility System (ONE), an online portal used by more than a million Oregonians to apply for benefits, including Medicaid and food stamps, is generally correct in determining who qualifies, an audit conducted by the Secretary of State’s office found.

But the auditors also found the accuracy of ONE’s decisions often depends on the skill of the person providing input into the system.

IT audit manager Erika Ungern, with the Secretary of State’s office, said they did spot checks of the records of hundreds of randomly chosen individuals, and from that they concluded data entry errors are common.

“It’s more than anyone would prefer,” Ungern said.

However, the auditors didn’t have the time or resources to develop a sampling method with the power to generalize how common data entry errors are system wide.

The ONE system is a notable technology win for the Oregon Department of Human Services and its partner the Oregon Health Authority, an agency dogged for years by its failure to successfully launch an online health insurance exchange.

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The system runs on code Oregon acquired for free from the state of Kentucky. It cost $416 million (mostly in federal dollars) to redesign and maintain it. The system manages eligibility for $18.7 billion in benefits for Oregonians.

Some people can fill out benefits applications in ONE by themselves online. For more complicated benefits, people often get help from an eligibility worker — 3,300 workers across the state can access the system.

Auditors found a “notably high” rate of data input errors particularly in their review of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) program, which provides financial assistance for food. Eleven out of 40 random cases they looked at included errors that could impact the level of benefits a family gets.

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The audit took place during the COVID-19 public health emergency, when temporary federal rules allowed every enrolled family to receive the largest possible SNAP benefit, so ultimately those errors didn’t harm people or waste program resources. But now that SNAP is operating per its normal rules again, any similar errors could affect recipients.

Auditors also found some problems with the data people uploaded to qualify for Medicaid.

For example, Ungern said, some people were clearly inputting their annual income in the system, without realizing it was asking for their monthly income instead.

For many applicants, Medicaid eligibility is based primarily on income level.

“Pay very close attention to what it is asking you,” Ungern said. “That really would tend to bump up the income that you’re reporting.”

The automated parts of the system can catch data entry errors if they involve wage or unemployment income, which it can cross-check against federal data.

But it doesn’t have the power to catch those errors for everyone who is self-employed or has sporadic income, according to Ungern.

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Ungern said she doesn’t think the mistakes uncovered reflect people trying to game the system. The rules for public benefits, she said, can be hard to follow. Particularly as rules shifted during the pandemic, she said.

The audit also found that in a small percentage of cases, eligibility workers are manually reversing correct decisions made by ONE’s automated system, a problem that Ungern said she flagged during the last system audit in 2017.

Responding to the audit, Fariborz Pakseresht, Director of the Oregon Department of Human Services, said the agency is exploring ways to improve validation of income, including self-employment income. And the agency plans to limit the power to override ONE’s automated eligibility decisions to managers and leads.

News Source : https://www.opb.org/article/2024/10/10/oregon-eligibility-system-data-entry-errors/