COMPUTER SYSTEM TO HUNT DEADBEAT PARENTS DELAYED.Byline: David Greenberg The creator of this article, or someone who has substantially contributed to it, may have a conflict of interest regarding its subject matter. It may require cleanup to comply with Wikipedia's content policies, particularly neutral point of view. Daily News Staff Writer Testing delays and the illness of the project manager have postponed by two months the start-up Start-up The earliest stage of a new business venture. of the district attorney's new state-of-the-art computer system for tracking deadbeat dead·beat 1 Slang n. 1. One who does not pay one's debts. 2. A lazy person; a loafer. adj. Not fulfilling one's obligations or paying one's debts: a deadbeat dad. parents. Ventura County is now scheduled to have its $2 million KIDZ system up and running by Dec. 1, because Kern Kern, river, 155 mi (249 km) long, rising in the S Sierra Nevada Mts., E Calif., and flowing south, then southwest to a reservoir in the extreme southern part of the San Joaquin valley. The river has Isabella Dam as its chief facility. County, which designed and built the system, has taken longer than expected to complete testing. In addition, a member of the Kern County District Attorney's Office, who serves as project manager for the KIDZ system, suffered a massive heart attack two weeks ago, which further delayed testing. ``We want to make sure the system is fully stable and fully tested before we go live on it,'' said Greg Totten, chief deputy district attorney. ``We're not going to implement it until we're satisfied it's ready to be implemented.'' The KIDZ computer will replace the $100 million Statewide Automated au·to·mate v. au·to·mat·ed, au·to·mat·ing, au·to·mates v.tr. 1. To convert to automatic operation: automate a factory. 2. Child Support System, which contained glitches that resulted in the loss of information and families receiving incorrect child support payments. Ventura County plans to do its own tests of the KIDZ system beginning Nov. 1 to ensure that all of the data are accurately converted from the state system. More than 300 employees in the state network must also be trained to use the new system. Once all tests are complete, Ventura County plans to sign a three-year lease on the IBM (International Business Machines Corporation, Armonk, NY, www.ibm.com) The world's largest computer company. IBM's product lines include the S/390 mainframes (zSeries), AS/400 midrange business systems (iSeries), RS/6000 workstations and servers (pSeries), Intel-based servers (xSeries) computer and related KIDZ software to help track its 40,000 child support cases, 20 percent of which involve parents' failure to pay an adequate amount of money. Most of the cost of the $2 million system will be reimbursed with federal and state grants, including $282,564 for the computer lease. The state system currently costs the county $33,000 a month for maintenance and operation. Since the California network came on line in November 1996, Totten said there have been 190 cases where the balances owed in child support disappeared from the computer's ledger The principal book of accounts of a business enterprise in which all the daily transactions are entered under appropriate headings to reflect the debits and credits of each account. , including one incident where a $17,000 debt was not only eliminated, but a credit balance was tabulated after the next payment was received. ``You're constantly having to devote additional resources to address problems,'' Totten said. |
|
||||||||||||
Printer friendly
Cite/link
Email
Feedback
Reader Opinion