Washington - It's good to know Uncle Sam doesn't give up; he just stops for breath. Then again, maybe the Social Security Administration was ahead of its time with its first big plan to automate disability claims. 

More than a decade after the Social Security Administration took its first stab at overhauling the disability-claims process - a doomed effort that cost $71 million and took seven years before being abandoned in 1999 - the agency is at it again. 

This time, Social Security Administrator Jo Anne Barnhart has vowed to go paperless by 2005 by creating electronic folders for the millions of people who apply for disability benefits each year. The idea is to let the far-flung agencies and doctors that handle the mountains of claims documents do so with common folders online. The agency hopes this will save money and ease the crushing backlogs that have plagued the national disability-insurance program for more than a decade. 

Barnhart's plan is on the frontier - some might say the cliff - of a movement inside big corporations and government to exploit technologies for more data-sharing over networks. The agency has hired IBM to help it build a huge 52-terabyte electronic repository that can be accessible to 65,000 users around the country. 

"They have undertaken one of biggest content-management systems in the world," said IBM Vice President Brett MacIntyre. 

Indeed, the plan is so ambitious that the General Accounting Office issued a report this year concluding that the agency was moving too quickly, starting a national rollout in January without doing adequate pilot testing first or resolving several technical challenges. Because the Social Security Administration is introducing its five-part system in stages, starting new parts before others are fully built, the agency "lacks assurance that the interrelated components will work together," the GAO told Congress in March. 

Yet the Social Security Administration appears undaunted. It is charging ahead with a project it estimates to cost about $800 million over seven years in hopes of saving $1.3 billion in reduced costs for paper-handling, mailing and folder storage. 

"A lot of people didn't think it could be done or that we could accomplish what we did by January 2004," said William Gray, the agency's deputy commissioner. 

In the new system, every document is stored as a digital file in a central repository. They can be transferred as electronic copies to state agencies that process claims or over the Internet in encrypted form to medical experts. Staffers can copy file collections onto disks and mail them, Gray said. The agency gives special passwords and identification numbers to health professionals to submit digital files, such as X-ray images. 

In addition, appeals hearings will be recorded and stored as digital audio files in each applicant's electronic folder. 

In January, the Social Security Administration started implementing key pieces of its paperless project in certain states. Many states, however, still have to replace their old computers with new machines. So far, 18 states get electronic downloads of claims data, and eight are using the electronic folders. For more than a year, the agency has been letting people file disability claims at least partially online. 

Gray said the agency expects to slice at least 100 days off the time it takes to process claims, which can take two to three years if an appeal is filed. 

Andrew Warzecha, senior vice president for the Meta Group, agreed that the Social Security Administration has a better chance to go paperless now than in the 1990s, when data-sharing technology was still clumsy: "It is only recently that this category of software has been architected to do these kinds of things." 

Of course, who hasn't heard that before? Any way you look at it, the project bears watching for the clues it can offer on whether big vendors like IBM will be able to deliver on their promise to take data-sharing to massive levels.