Missouri officials say progress being made on childcare payment backlog

JEFFERSON CITY, Mo. (KMIZ)

After months of delays in getting payments to childcare providers, the Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education says it's turning a corner with subsidy program payments.

The delayed payments have been an ongoing issue for months. In December, technological issues delayed state reimbursement payments for months, putting daycare centers at risk or out of business across the state.

During a meeting Tuesday, Pam Thomas with the Office of Childhood said the goal was to have reviews of past payments finished by the end of October. She warned the process would not be finished until around the end of November.

"It took us over a month longer than expected to get the data from the system and have it ready to be calculated," Thomas said. "Missing data fields, incorrect data fields, all of that has to be cleaned up for these records before you can run them through the calculator."

Thomas said some of the data was not correctly loaded into the new system or was missing some key data points, which caused payments to not calculate correctly.

From Jan. 1 to May 31, over 1,800 childcare providers were paid. Around 900 providers are pending a review of the calculation used for their payment to ensure it is accurate. Forty-four percent of the pending payments are due to attendance and authorization issues, incorrect rates, overpayment and other issues, according to Thomas.

Thomas said payments have been made to providers every month since January.

Since the summer, Thomas said DESE has doubled the number of people helping with around 70 contracted and temporary staff working on applications, system issues and phone calls.

DESE officials were grilled by Missouri House Elementary and Secondary Education Committee members at a special hearing after more than 3,000 childcare providers were left waiting for subsidy payments from the department. 

According to the board, many states are wondering how the backlog issues will be fixed.

"There have been several states that have reached out to me to find out how we're fixing the system because there are several that are going down the same path that we have prior," said board commissioner Karla Eslinger. "This isn't unique just to Missouri, it's something that is kind of across our nation."

More than 29,000 children and 2,400 childcare providers are approved for the childcare subsidy program.