Plans for a multistate test using smart cards for government benefits have been scaled back, but the test is on track to begin in early 2006.
Alice Bruning, the director of the New England Partners project, said last week that the program received approval in February from the Department of Agriculture, which is sponsoring this and several similar tests in other states.
New England Partners was originally designed to use a hybrid card with both a traditional magnetic stripe and a chip to process payments for several benefits programs in six New England states. It was to focus mainly on the Women, Infants and Children program in each state but was also expected to manage a host of other assistance programs, including food stamps, immunization, Head Start, and screening for lead poisoning prevention.
Ms. Bruning said the program now involves only WIC, though it will still be interoperable across the six states - Maine, Vermont, New Hampshire, Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island. It was supposed to begin in October 2004 but now is expected to get under way next January or February.
Ms. Bruning said budget cuts caused the postponement and that the Agriculture Department's Food and Nutrition Service, which oversees WIC, would not subsidize the inclusion of the other programs. Other benefits programs will be allowed to hook into the payment system, but their organizers will have to provide their own funding.
The initial pilot program is to begin in Rochester, N.H., and the other states are expected to come on board within six months, she said.
Ms. Bruning said the project has been in the works since the mid-1990s, when the economy was stronger and the government more willing to support such efforts.
"Anything was possible because the money was flowing," she said. "Since then budgets at the state and national levels have dried up."
Conventional wisdom holds that WIC transactions must be processed with smart cards because they are more complex than most other benefit programs. Participants can buy only a certain amounts of products and in some cases certain brands, and magnetic stripe cards cannot store enough data to manage these purchases.
Though other smart card WIC pilots have shown that the technology works, Food and Nutrition Services has said they are still too costly, so the agency has authorized magnetic stripe pilots as well.
Suanne Buggy, a spokeswoman for Food and Nutrition Service, said in an e-mail that that agency "remains technology-neutral in its support of current and future EBT initiatives. It is possible that more than one EBT model will emerge from the pilots and prove technically feasible and cost-effective. We do not yet have enough information to evaluate this."
A test of smart-card-based WIC payments in Ohio is slated to end in June, when a processing contract with JPMorgan Chase & Co. runs out, even though the program still has funds left from its original grant. Food and Nutrition has denied proposals to expand the program, and chose to terminate the project early rather than negotiate a new processing contract. Instead, WIC recipients in Ohio will revert to cumbersome paper coupons.
Other smart card programs for WIC are ongoing in Texas, New Mexico, and Wyoming, and a magnetic stripe test in Washington State, is set to begin in June.
Besides downsizing, the New England Partners project has had other setbacks. In January its longtime quality assurance contractor, Burger, Carroll & Associates Inc., dropped out.
Art Burger, the Santa Fe company's executive vice president, declined to discuss the matter. Ms. Bruning said that as the needs of the project changed, her team found that its vision differed from Burger Carroll's.
There was also a change at the top; Ms. Bruning took over her position nine months ago from Robin McBrearty, who was taking on double duty as the WIC director for New Hampshire.
"She was doing more for this project than any person could humanly be expected to do," Ms. Bruning said. So the decision was made to "give her an opportunity to represent the state on this project as the WIC director and not have to be the chief cook and bottle washer as well."
Robert A. Bucceri, a general partner with Chaddsford Planning Associates of West Chester, Pa., wrote New England Partners' original $2.2 million grant proposal, in 1999. He said the loss of the other programs could doom the project.
"Given the lack of caseload in those states" for WIC, he said, "I think they're going to be hard-pressed to make a financial case that this thing can be rolled out across six states."
