HCFA lags in race to beat millennial clock
HCFA lags in race to beat millennial clock
The report’s title says it all: Year 2000 Computing Crisis: Time is Running Out for Federal Agencies to Prepare for the New Millennium.
"Computing Crisis" refers to computer programs that were never programmed to handle dates beyond 1999. To save space, most computer programmers lopped off the "19" when referring to years, using only the last two digits. So when the millennium changes, many computers won’t "know" whether the year is 2000 or 1900.
One of the chief culprits among those not meeting the timetable for Millennium preparation? The Health Care Financing Administration (HCFA).
That was the conclusion of Joel C. Willemssen, director of information resources management, accounting and information management division of the General Accounting Office, which he reported to a trio of Congressional subcommittees on July 10.
HCFA, as of May, "had not completed numerous critical assessment activities for the systems run by its contractors to process approximately $200 billion annually in Medicare claims," Willemssen told members of the Subcommittee on Government Management, Information and Technology, the House Committee on Government Reform and Oversight, and the Subcommittee on Technology, House Committee on Science. "Specifically, HCFA had not required systems contractors to submit year 2000 plans for approval, and lacked contracts or other legal agreement detailing how or when the year 2000 problem would be corrected, or indeed whether contractors would even certify that they would correct the problem."
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