TALLAHASSEE -- Almost exactly a year after Nubia Barahona’s chemical-drenched and decomposing body was found in the flatbed of her father’s pickup truck, lawmakers in the House praised and pushed through a bill Thursday that supporters say will help prevent similar tragedies involving Florida children.

“Nothing we can do would bring Nubia back,” said the bill’s sponsor, Rep. Jose Felix Diaz, a Miami Republican. “But it helps us learn from that case so she didn’t die in vain.”

Diaz said his bill was inspired largely by the report of a child-welfare panel that investigated the 10-year-old girl’s death. Nubia’s adoptive parents, Carmen and Jorge Barahona are in jail awaiting trial on murder charges. Her twin brother — who was also tortured, according to police — now is living with family members in Texas.

One of the bill’s provisions allows child-abuse investigators to close a case without fully investigating it where there is evidence the allegations result from a false report. “One of the things that the panel found is that there was a lot of repeat investigating,” said Diaz , who rode along with a DCF child-abuse investigator on a case involving a parent embroiled in a “marital dispute” resulting in eight calls to the state’s abuse hotline.

Child-welfare administrators have said the new authority will allow DCF to close a case the agency believes to be false in an effort to better manage the time of overworked child-abuse investigators.

The bill also gives DCF about $50 million in new money to dramatically upgrade the agency’s statewide child-welfare computer system — a behemoth that has bedeviled investigators and caseworkers for more than a decade.

“We want to get to a point where, when you call the hotline and push a button, all of that information is right there at the fingertips of the investigator and the hotline,” said Joe Follick, DCF’s spokesman in Tallahassee.

The House bill also adds to state law a practice that has been in place for several years: DCF now will have statutory authority to offer services to struggling families when one of the parents asks the state for help.

“This is a substantial improvement,” Follick added.

Some children’s advocates, though, said the measure does little to reform the state’s chronically troubled child welfare system , and may make some things worse. They said it leaves unclear who would have the authority to close cases believed to be false reports — and under what circumstances..

“I can’t help but be afraid that this legislation creates a loophole for an investigator who just wants to close a case,” said Andrea Moore, a Coral Springs children’s advocate.

The Barahona panel’s concerns about repeat investigations had nothing to do with malicious reports from aggrieved spouses. The panel, and a Miami-Dade grand jury report that followed, criticized DCF investigators’ willingness to accept the claims of parents accused of harming their children. In Nubia’s case, the grand jury said, investigators manifested a “bias of trust” that allowed the couple to repeatedly torment the twins.

“A concern of the panel was that all sorts of red flags were not adequately followed up on. That was the issue of repeat visits, where parents said everything was OK, and investigators were too quick to close the case,” said Jim Sewell, a 17-year former Florida Department of Law Enforcement agent and former DCF consultant who helped write the Barahona panel report. “That’s the risk you run if you make it too easy to close cases.”

Follick, the DCF spokesman, said state law makes clear what is a “false report.”

A similar bill in the state Senate has one more stop before a floor vote.