Providers Ratchet Up Late Payment Complaints to City

Manhattan provider Jenny Rivera leads others in rallying for provider union rights before a public hearing that focused on delays and inaccuracies in the city’s payments to providers.

Home-based, child-care providers and their supporters, in a hearing at New York City Hall on April 26th, reported frustrating payment delays that are continuing, even as the city moves to streamline its early child care operations.

The hearing focused on the Administration for Children’s Services’ (ACS) handling of the subsidized Family Child Care program, and was convened by the heads of two City Council committees, Bill deBlasio, of General Welfare, and Helen Sears, of Women’s Issues. Both favor additional funding for subsidized childcare, and see the payment problems as a serious concern.

DeBlasio labeled the problems “disincentives for doing this kind of work” and Sears pointed out that since more women are heads of household, “Daycare has become a need, yet there’s not that equality of pay.”

The providers - involved for more than a year in one of the largest union organizing campaigns, led by the UFT and ACORN, in the city’s history - are pushing for faster back-pay settlements. Officials at ACS, which now administers all provider payments as a result of a recent merger of similar operations at the Human Resources Administration, also testified at the hearing.

Among providers who testified, Paulette Hay-Smalls, of the Bronx, told city officials she is still owed seven month’s pay for a child she kept three years ago. The child’s parent won a fair hearing over the case, said Hay-Smalls, but ACS never paid her. “This system is not set up to support the providers,” she said.

Hundreds of other providers face similar payment problems, said union organizers.

“Too often providers are paid late, or not paid the correct amount,” said Amina Rachman, special assistant to UFT president Randi Weingarten. “Too often ACS fails to notify the provider when a child in her care is no longer eligible for state subsidies.”

Apart from the delays and miscalculations, providers are only paid once a month.

“When the pay for this work is as low as it is – under $19,000 a year on average for long hours – and comes only once a month, providers simply cannot afford to be paid late or not at all,” said Rachman.

When providers have questions about payment, they are directed to call ACS’s hotline, where they routinely wait on hold for 10 to 15 minutes to speak to someone. Hundreds of such calls received each week end up taking weeks, even months to resolve.

Melanie Hertzog, deputy commissioner of ACS’ child care division, testified that of the average 1,800 hotline calls received each week, more than 400 - involving lost or stolen checks, or questions about previous payment that require investigation - get referred to a research unit, where it’s likely to take weeks, sometimes months to resolve. Most of these calls are resolved within 60 days, however, stated division head Kay Hendon.

Still, Councilman deBlasio expressed dissatisfaction with the amount of time ACS takes to resolve back-pay cases. The Brooklyn representative led the city’s launch last year of a pilot program called Provider’s Choice, which reimburses providers for out-of-pocket, daycare expenses.

"Most of us are living paycheck to paycheck. To have a lost or stolen check is a big deal,” he said. “Having to wait 60 or even 20 days is a very long time for people,” he continued, and then urged agency officials, “Can we speed this up substantially?”

Brooklyn provider Tammie Miller testified that many licensed providers are incorrectly paid the lower, licensed-exempt-provider rate. And while some providers have waited months to get payment issues resolved, they have “suffered evictions, utility turn-off notices, credit delinquencies, and repossessions.”

Providers testifying at the hearing included (l. to r.) Adeniki Adesina, Dorothy Presley, Paulette Hay-Smalls, Tammie Miller, and Dinah Yisrael.

Councilman Charles Barron suggested ACS look at reducing the once-a-month payment time to two weeks, and intimated that with an anticipated $4.4 billion budget surplus the city should have no hesitancy about paying for “one of the most precious services we can provide in this city.”

Hertzog told city council members ACS is working to make it easer for providers to communicate directly with the agency, a commitment provider union organizers have pushed for in ongoing meetings with agency officials.

ACS has made several improvements to the family child care system since those meetings began nearly a year ago, including the hiring of two additional staffers for the hotline and four for the research unit. The agency has also eliminated what had been a 120-day waiting period for lost or stolen provider checks; when Hertzog spoke of at the hearing, providers applauded. Now, a provider can submit documentation requesting a replacement check 15 days after the original was issued, said Hertzog.

Hendon, an associate ACS commissioner, said the agency is “questioning” whether to continue allowing its 80 provider networks to charge providers in those networks, a $17 per-child, per-week fee. ACS contracts with the networks to provide support services to providers. The fee was instituted to cover the networks’ administrative costs, but many providers say it is unfair and that networks should be held accountable for their use of the money.