Washington, Kentucky, Ohio and Nebraska Advocates Use Administrative Advocacy to Protect Due Process Rights of TANF, Food Stamps, and Medicaid Beneficiaries
Welfare Law Center and Other Legal Advocates File OCR Complaint Against New York City Welfare Agency for Discriminating Against Individuals with Psychiatric Disabilities
From the December 2001 issue of Welfare News
Assuring that state and local welfare agencies provide welfare applicants’ and recipients’ with the fundamental due process rights to adequate notice and a fair hearing remains an important goal of welfare advocates. Advocates have often had to resort to litigation to enforce these basic rights, but they have also used administrative advocacy to achieve significant improvements, especially in making notices more understandable.
Most recently, complaints by Washington and Kentucky advocates about inadequate notices led each state agency to establish a task force of agency staff and advocates to undertake a comprehensive revision of TANF, Food Stamp, and Medicaid notices. Washington has just begun to use the new notices, and Kentucky is expected to have the first set of its revised notices ready next spring. These developments follow upon the work of Tennessee advocates who collaborated several years ago with the Tennessee welfare agency to revise all of the state’s TANF, Food Stamps, and Medicaid notices. See Making Written Notices Understandable: A Collaborative Approach by Adinah Robertson and Russ Overby on the Welfare Law Center’s website. In addition, advocates in Ohio and Nebraska have reported success in efforts to make the fair hearing process more accessible to applicants and recipients. This article reports on these developments.
The Welfare Law Center is interested in learning of similar efforts in other states and is available to assist advocates working on these issues. Contact Gina Mannix at the Center, mannix (at) nclej.org. The Welfare Law Center’s website also contains information on recent litigation raising due process issues, in addition to information on the Tennessee notice revision project.
Columbia Legal Services secures comprehensive revision of Washington state’s public benefits notices.
In November, 2001 the Washington Department of Social and Health Services began using revised TANF, Food Stamp, and Medicaid notices. This roll-out marked the culmination of the first phase of an intensive process of re-writing and improving some 200 different computer-generated notices, ranging from appointment and approval letters to denial, termination, and other adverse action notices. The second phase of the project will involve refining and improving the notices in response to experience.
The project began two years ago after Meagan MacKenzie, an attorney with Columbia Legal Services, threatened litigation over the inadequacy of the agency’s notices. Among the deficiencies in the notices were the failure to provide case-specific information that informed the applicant or recipient of the basis for the adverse action. For example, notices would inform an individual that she was denied benefits because of excess resources, without identifying the nature of the resource, its value, and the program’s resource limit. Other problems included the failure to identify the legal basis for the action and incomplete information about fair hearing rights.
In response to Columbia Legal Services’ threat of litigation, the agency acknowledged that notices needed improvements and established a task force to revise and simplify the notices. The task force was initially limited to agency staff. MacKenzie successfully sought to be an observer, and the agency, quickly recognizing that she could make a positive contribution, invited her to participate on the task force. MacKenzie brought to the process not only her perspective as an advocate for low-income clients, but also her expertise in the law governing all three programs, an expertise that was unique among task force members. While the process involved extensive give-and-take, agency staff commitment and sensitivity to the issues contributed to the ultimate outcome. A key agency staff member was a former welfare recipient, and the agency contracted with a current welfare recipient who had a background in technical writing (and who is affiliated with the Welfare Rights Organizing Coalition) to draft the revisions for task force consideration. The Welfare Rights Organizing Coalition field-tested the notices with some of its members and provided feedback to the task force.
One of the major accomplishments of the project is the refinement and implementation of protocols for inserting free-form, case-specific information in the text of the notices. These protocols instruct the worker as to exactly what kind of case-specific information needs to be inserted to support each general reason code. In addition, the new system involves a transition from a main frame system of issuing notices from Olympia under which workers did not see the notices that were sent out but nonetheless gave instructions for text for the notices. This system often resulted in confusing notices. The new online system allows workers to generate notices from their desk-top computers and insert case-specific text appropriate to each reason code for an action. When a worker selects a reason code for an action, she is presented with hyperlinks to the protocols which give detailed instructions as to the case-specific information required for that particular notice.
The project also provided for translation of the notices into twelve different languages and training of caseworkers to emphasize their longstanding but previously neglected duty to provide case-specific information. The agency will also use its intranet to seek comments from agency staff about inadvertent errors in the new notices and suggestions for improvements. It plans to make this comment system internet-based in the future to receive comments from the public.
The agency task force expects that the new notices will result in significant savings for the agency, and accordingly has applied for a governor’s award program that rewards state employees for implementing cost-saving projects.
In reflecting on her experience with this project, MacKenzie identified two essential ingredients for such a project. First, it must involve an advocate with expertise in the underlying programs to assure that the content of the notices conforms to governing law and policy. Second, notices should be tested with clients with no more than a high school education as a check on whether the drafters have accomplished their goal of making notices understandable to their intended recipients.
The Welfare Law Center will post several examples of the new notices on its website - www.welfarelaw.org. Meagan MacKenzie can be reached at Columbia Legal Services, 406 Legion Way SE, #300, Olympia, WA 98501, phone (360) 943-6260, ext. 222, or email meagan.mackenzie@ColumbiaLegal.org.
Kentucky advocates participate in welfare agency task force to revise notices.
Advocates from the Office of Kentucky Legal Services Programs, Louisville Legal Aid Society, Appalachian Research and Defense Fund and Kentucky Task Force on Hunger are part of an ongoing welfare agency task force to revise and simplify computer-generated notices for TANF, Food Stamps, and Medicaid. The first set of revised notices, including approval and appointment letters, requests for information, and notices of fair hearing rights and rights under the Americans with Disabilities (ADA) Act may be in place in the spring of 2002. Revisions to adverse action notices will follow.
According to a report from Rich Seckel of the Office of Kentucky Legal Services Programs, the effort began as a result of an exchange between Anne Joseph of the Kentucky Task Force on Hunger and state legislators who were reviewing proposed agency changes to the State’s Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) recertification procedures. In response the welfare agency’s claim that its notices of recertification appointments would be easy to understand, Joseph provided examples of confusing notices to state legislators. Their concern led to the agency’s commitment to overhaul all of its notices to make them more readable. In July, 2001 the agency established a working group whose members include agency field staff, policy staff, and computer staff, as well as advocates who were invited to join the work group at the outset. Members bring a range of experience, from experience writing materials for program beneficiaries, to expertise with the program rules and operations and computer systems knowledge. The working group has devoted significant time and energy to the task and the process has been collaborative, rather than adversarial. The working group plans to seek comment on its draft notices, which will also be tested by the computer staff and with program participants. The draft notices will be reviewed for design consistency as well.
The process is expected to be completed in phases, with the first notices going into use in the spring of 2002. Seckel reports that the agency has already agreed to language describing an individual’s rights under the ADA. The language is very similar to the model language contained in the January, 2001 guidance issued by the Office of Civil Rights at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, www.hhs.gov/ocr/prohibition.html.
The Welfare Law Center will work with Kentucky advocates to post examples of the final notices on the WLC website. For more information contact Rich Seckel, Office of Kentucky Legal Services Programs, 201 West Short Street, Suite 310, Lexington, KY 40507, tel. 859-233-3057; email richseckel@prodigy.net.
Ohio hearing requests increase with new postage-paid, self-addressed fair hearing requests.
According to a recent report from Bob Bonthius, an attorney with Legal Aid Society of Cleveland, advocates have worked with the state welfare agency to develop a self-addressed postage-paid State Fair Hearing Request form that the state now includes as part of every CRIS-E computer-generated notice of action (approvals, denials, increases, decreases, and terminations) sent to applicants and recipients of TANF (called OWF in Ohio), Medicaid, DA (the state general assistance program) and Food Stamps. In addition, they worked with the state welfare agency to develop a postage-paid, self-addressed Administrative Appeal Request form that the state now sends to every unrepresented applicant or recipient along with every State Fair Hearing Decision. In Ohio the State Hearing is the first level of appeal and the Administrative Appeal is the second level, followed by judicial review.
Bonthius reports that since the agency began using these self-mailers, requests for State Hearings and Administrative Appeals have almost doubled, and the number of timely requests has increased dramatically. He estimates that some 6000 more families will timely request and win State Hearings as a result of these self-mailers.
This successful advocacy is one of the achievements of a longstanding project, initiated by advocates, to address notice issues, computer soft-ware issues, policy and procedural issues, etc. For a sample of the self-mailer in the context of an OWF termination notice visit the website of the Legal Aid Society of Cleveland, www.lasclev.org/Medicaid/medicaid.htm and under “General” click on "Delinking messages." The self-mailer is at pp. 10-11. For more information contact Bob Bonthius at the Legal Aid Society of Cleveland, RHBonthi@lasclev.org.
Nebraska Appleseed reports successful advocacy to protect welfare clients’ hearing rights.
The Welfare Due Process Project (WDPP) of Nebraska Appleseed for Law in the Public Interest recently reported that it has successfully resolved the recurring problem of welfare clients’ inability to obtain appeal forms from their local welfare offices. Welfare clients were told that they had to get forms from a caseworker and were given incorrect forms. The WDPP brought this issue to the attention of central office agency staff which emphasized to local offices that forms must be provided to any client requesting one and that forms must be available in the receptions are. The agency will provide retraining to caseworkers who are not complying. For more information contact Ann Vogel at Nebraska Appleseed for Law in the Public Interest, WDPP@neappleseed.org.
