By Stephen Barr
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, August 3, 1998; Page A10

BALTIMORE – Kathleen M. Adams remembers when she first heard about a possible computer problem in 2000.

She was in a 1989 meeting when Social Security Administration officials described a computer crash in a field office. After inadvertently overpaying some benefits, the agency arranged to recoup the money by taking deductions from monthly Social Security checks. But when the repayment installment plan was programmed beyond 2000, the computer screen went blank.

"We looked at each other and said, 'Whoa!' " recalled Adams, the assistant deputy commissioner for systems. "It didn't take a lot of brains to figure out that if that piece of software acted in that way, we probably were going to have a problem with a lot of software."

With that meeting Social Security became one of the first federal agencies to stumble onto the Year 2000 problem. The agency's head start appears to have paid off: As of June, 94 percent of its systems have been modified for Year 2000 operations, up from 92 percent in May. By December Social Security expects to certify all systems as ready, allowing a full year of operation before the rollover into 2000.

"It was not hard to convince people that this was something we had to do," Adams said. "All you had to tell people was, 'If we do not do this, the software we have right now will not work. And what that software does is generate 50 million payments a month.' "

Social Security keeps track of what Adams calls "life events" – when Americans are born, when they die, when they marry, how many children they have and what they earn. Each event involves a date, often used to calculate a benefit.

"We cannot do our job without automation," Adams said. "Think about our numbers. We put into the economy 50 million payments a month. You can't write them manually. You can't calculate them manually."

As a date conversion pioneer, Social Security started slowly, "figuring out what the process was," Adams said. Agency programmers eventually sifted through 35 million lines of mainframe codes. Obsolete desktop terminals were replaced with modern PCs that will work in 2000. Plans have been drafted to shift work as needed from offices experiencing computer problems to those that are problem-free.

"I'm very comfortable where we are," Adams said, adding, "You're always a little bit nervous when you're dealing with a project that's never been done before. You always say to yourself, 'Have we thought of everything we need to think of?' "