Summary: Pursuant to a congressional request, GAO analyzed the Health Care Financing Administration's (HCFA): (1) fiscal year (FY) 1990 budget request for its information technology systems and data processing needs; and (2) efforts to reduce Medicare contractors' automatic data processing (ADP) costs.
GAO found that HCFA: (1) requested $73.6 million for its information technology systems for FY 1990; (2) cited the closeness of budget deadlines in explaining its inability to support its inclusion of a $22-million cost estimate in the budget request for implementing the Medicare Catastrophic Coverage Act of 1988; (3) included $13.1 million in its budget request for a computer improvement program, which it had expected to complete during FY 1990; (4) after submitting the request, projected an additional $7.2 million for FY 1991 and FY 1992 to complete the computer improvement program; (5) included in its programmatic budget estimates about $947 million in ADP-related costs for paying states and contractors for processing Medicaid and Medicare claims and for implementing a new ADP system for processing Medicare claims; and (6) in January 1989, announced a policy to minimize Medicare ADP operations maintenance and enhancement costs by limiting the funding for system changes to encourage contractors to use shared ADP systems maintenance and processing and adopt HCFA standard software packages.
