Barbara Zerzan, director of the Center for Benefits and Services at the Community Service Society and the former head of an HRA-contracted welfare-to-work vendor (not one of the current Back to Work group), believes that vendors generally don’t want to issue sanctions but find themselves with no other recourse. “These vendors are so stressed out, they’re dealing with so many people. If they see the first sign of someone not cooperating, they sanction,” Zerzan said.
Diamond argued that the assumption that HRA wants to sanction people is fundamentally counter-intuitive. The more people who are sanctioned by the agency, the greater risk HRA faces of failing to meet federal work placement guidelines. Diamond recognizes that there’s no specific measure for the sensitivity of case managers, but the emphasis on job retention makes case management essential. “To realize the goals of keeping people in jobs, vendors have to provide this help to get people to stick with it,” he said.
The next step
At this point, CVH calls for HRA to revise its contracting structure in a way that pays vendors for helping people get transitional benefits, make job placements more individually tailored and increase emphasis on education and training, address what it sees as an unfairness in the sanctioning process, and improve oversight and transparency.
It's not clear that the agency is interested in integrating CVH's critiques and suggestions. After HRA strongly criticized CVH’s last report, which focused on the WeCare program, CVH sought to partner with the agency on this report. CVH and HRA went back and forth for a number of months over a possible research partnership. HRA at first agreed in principle to participate, but then backed out when it deemed the researchers proposed by CVH would not be sufficiently unbiased.
HRA spokeswoman Brancaccio believes the agency’s critics don’t see the whole picture. “It’s old news to us. This is just another report with no real methodology,” she said. “We tried to work with them. Their numbers are not accurate. We can refute any of it.”
