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Giving Hope and Support to America's ChildrenOn August 22, I was privileged to be present when the President signed The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996-welfare reform. With that action, new demands and new responsibilities were placed on us, which, upon relection, are really new opportunities.
We must never forget that the support of children is the essence of our work. The banner that I placed over my office door my first week at OCSE is still there: a banner that reminds me each day that I have just one job and that is to put "Children First."
On signing the welfare reform bill into law, President Clinton said: "There is no area where we need more personal responsibility than child support." He was referring to the responsibility of parents to meet their obligations to their children, to pay their legally and morally obligated support.
But his words apply as well to those of us who work in the program. There is no job where a daily personal and professional display of responsibility is more needed: the kind of responsibility that says, "Whatever it takes to get the job done, whatever is needed to put children first, that's what I'll do."
This bill is good for child support enforcement-there can be little doubt about that-and that's exciting to think about. We can be sure that in years to come millions of children will live better lives and have expanded opportunities because of this legislation.
As child support enforcement professionals who have labored hard to improve the program, you can justifiably take pride in knowing that part of the credit for this historic change belongs to you. Many of the new enforcement tools derive from lessons learned in the field.
On behalf of all us here in OCSE and, more importantly, on behalf of our nation's children, whom you have consistently and generously put first, let me say, "Thank you."
This issue of CSR carries several articles about the new legislation and how it will affect your work. After you have read them, won't you take a moment to drop us a line to let us know your views? We'd like to hear from you.
Under welfare reform, each state must operate a child support enforcement program which meets federal requirements, including:
A national new hire reporting system
The law establishes a Federal Case Registry and National Directory of New Hires to track delinquent parents across state lines. It requires that employers report all new hires to state agencies for transmittal of new hire information to the National Directory. Also, it simplifies procedures for direct withholding of child support from wages.
A streamlined system for establishing paternity
Under welfare reform it will be easier and faster to establish paternities. The voluntary in hospital paternity establishment program is strengthened. States must publicize the availability of and encourage the use of voluntary paternity establishment processes. Those persons who fail to cooperate in establishing paternity will have their monthly cash assistance reduced by at least 25 percent.
Uniform interstate child support laws
The new law provides for uniform rules, procedures, and forms for interstate cases. States which have not already adopted the Uniform Interstate Family Support Act (UIFSA) are required to do so by January 1, 1998.
Computerized state wide collections
States are required to establish central registries of child support orders and centralized collection and disbursement units. Also required: expedited state procedures for enforcement of child support.
Tough new penalties
States can implement strict child support enforcement techniques. The new law expands wage garnishment and allows states to seize assets and, in some cases, to require community service. States also are empowered to revoke drivers and professional licenses for parents who owe delinquent child support.
"Families First"
Under a new "Family First" policy, families no longer receiving assistance will have priority in the distribution of child support arrears. This new policy will bring families who have left welfare for work about $1 billion in support over the first six years. In addition, the $50 pass through is eliminated October 1, 1996.
Access and visitation programs
In an effort to increase noncustodial parents' involvement in their children's lives, the new law includes grants to help states establish programs that support and facilitate noncustodial parents' visitation with and access to their children.
Teen measures
In addition to its child support enforcement provisions, the welfare reform legislation contains other requirements of importance to the child support community. In order to receive assistance, unmarried minor parents are required to live with a responsible adult or in an adult supervised setting and participate in educational and training activities. The Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services is directed to establish and implement a strategy to prevent nonmarital teen births and assure th at at least 25 percent of communities have teen pregnancy prevention programs.
Other provisions
The law seeks to assist recipients of welfare in transitioning to work. With few exceptions, recipients must work after two years on assistance, while those who have received assistance for a total of five years (less at state option) will be ineligible for cash aid. But single parents with a child under age six who are unable to find child care cannot be penalized for failure to meet the work requirement. And women on welfare continue to receive health coverage for their families, including at least one ye ar of transitional Medicaid when they leave welfare for work.
State responsibilities include an initial assessment of recipients' job skills and maintenance of spending on welfare at a level of at least 80 percent of FY 1994's expenditures. To facilitate their efforts to provide work, states are allowed to create jobs by taking money now used for welfare checks and using it to create community service jobs.
If you would like to read specific articles about the new law in CSR, let us know. Send a note to the Editor, Phil Sharman, or call him at (202) 401 4626.
New regulations require states to perform an annual review of their operations to assess whether they are meeting the federal requirements for providing child support services, including expedited procedures. Also, they must report the calculations regarding the performance indicators to demonstrate how they are meeting the specified goals and objectives. Division of Audit personnel are ready to assist states that may want to develop their own self assessment units.
States that meet or exceed the performance standards for each of the performance measures will become eligible for incentive payments. Failing to meet goals, or using unreliable data to compute performance standards, could result in reduced levels of funding of from one to five percent of the amount of the family assistance block grant. Regional program or audit staff will provide technical assistance to states taking corrective action for substantially or repeatedly failing performance requirements or for reporting unreliable program data.
At least once every three years OCSE Audit will assess the reliability of a state's computer processed data and of the reporting system used to calculate its performance indicators. The audit also will examine the computer system's general and application controls.
General controls include security, organization, management, and system software and hardware controls. Application controls include authority of data origination, accuracy of data input, integrity of processing, and verification and distribution of output. Auditors will test compliance with the general and application controls and test data produced by the system to ensure that it is complete and reliable.
Another of audit's functions will be to determine whether federal and other funds made available to carry out a state's program are being appropriately expended and fully documented. Collections and disbursements of support payments will also be reviewed for proper processing and accounting.
Our audit personnel, OCSE Deputy Director David Gray Ross says, are looking forward to their new responsibilities and believe that the next several years will be an exciting and productive time for them and for the nation's child support enforcement program."
For further information contact Keith Bassett, Director, Division of Audit at (202) 401 9387.
Susan Bennington is an Auditor in the Audit Support Branch of OCSE's Division of Audit.
When not representing his constituents before the Maryland Legislature, Delegate Hubbard serves as an Assistant Sheriff in the Prince George's County, Maryland, Office of the Sheriff. That agency has a special partnership with the Federal Office of Child Support Enforcement through the Washington Metro Project (see November '94 CSR), which seeks to improve interstate child support enforcement in the Washington, DC, metropolitan area.
Maryland's status as a nonUIFSA State was identified by the Metro Project as a substantial barrier to effective child support enforcement. To remedy this situation, Metro Project Director Sonia Rivero approached Mr. Hubbard, requesting that he introduce legislation requiring the State to adopt UIFSA.
In a true spirit of partnership, Ms. Rivero and Mr. Hubbard worked together to educate State delegates about the importance of UIFSA. The strategy included Federal, State, and other UIFSA experts testifying before the legislature and Mr. Hubbard himself devoting time and energy to passage of the legislation.
OCSE Deputy Director David Gray Ross recognized Delegate Hubbard as Maryland's Legislator of the Year for 1996, citing his untiring efforts to strengthen the State's child support enforcement program. "Jim Hubbard deserves special thanks from the children of Maryland," Judge Ross said. Noting that all three metro jurisdictions have now passed UIFSA, Ross pointed to the law as "an important building block in the creation of a more efficient metropolitan Washington child support program."
If you would like more information about the Metro Project, contact Sonia Rivero at (301) 952 5854.
Sonia Rivero is Director of the Washington Metro Project, which aims to identify and overcome barriers to interstate case processing among the District of Columbia and nearby counties in Maryland and Virginia.
The Leadership Responsibility
As leaders, workers, advocates, policy makers, and constituents, The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996-welfare reform-challenges us to exercise our shared leadership responsibility. In exercising leadership, we are presented with an opportunity to make child support enforcement a program marked by a level of effectiveness that we can celebrate with pride. American's children deserve no less.
This new law comes at a time when we see:
In my own State of Iowa, we have developed and implemented the policy provisions of the Family Support Act, have provided automated support for most of these provisions, and have already implemented major policy provisions contained in the new welfare reform law. Every step has been fraught with difficulty and obstacles.
These changes, however, have brought increases in our collections per case, collections per worker, number of cases handled per worker, and number of families receiving support. They have also brought substantial increases in total collections. Many other states and jurisdictions have accomplished similar results.
But we are not close to being done. We have had to maintain a steady focus on policy and automated system development over the past several years. And while we want to think that we have always done our best, it is only in the past year that we in Iowa have been able to undertake the major planning effort needed to fully align our child support enforcement vision, policies, goals, strategies, and operational plan and structure. This alignment must be completed with a focus on the outcomes we wish to achieve .
For Iowa, the outcomes are threefold:
Some states are ahead of us in this effort; other states have not as yet been able to get this far. But we all have a clear need to get to the point where we can exercise the leadership needed to achieve the full alignment I have described above.
Fortunately, during the same time that Congress was considering the major policy changers that were ultimately included in the new welfare reform law, many of us in the states and federal government were working together to develop a new national strategic plan for child support enforcement. From the beginning, our view was that we could accomplish as much to improve the program through shared leadership in developing and implementing a vision, goals, performance measures, and strategies as could be accompl ished through major Congressional changes in the policy base for the program.
We now have both: a new welfare reform law and an agreed upon national strategic plan, complete with agreed upon performance measures. Since we know what we have to do, how we have to do it, and how we will measure it, we now have only to do it!
And we can get it done only by leading together. My own strong hope would be that in this coming year we begin to find effective ways to use the combined leadership talents of Congress and its staff, the Administration and it agencies, the state branches of government, the local agencies, the private sector companies, and the advocates to forge a program which works for children. This type of leading together has been very much in evidence during the give and take that occurred during the long welfare refor m debate. It serves as a model of how government should work at the policy making level. We need to create a similar example of making government work at the implementation level.
Jim Hennessey is Director of the Child Support Enforcement Program in Iowa and President of the National Council of State Child Support Enforcement Administrators.
Mary Jo Bane, Assistant Secretary for Children and Families, provided the keynote address at an upbeat opening session, reviewing the welfare reform legislation and the opportunities it presents for child support enforcement staff nationwide. President Clinton sent a letter of greeting to conference participants, read by NCSEA president Sue Bailey, while U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno contributed a videotaped message of support.
A total of 83 workshops upheld the conference theme: "Putting Children in the Winner's Circle." Many of the workshops were devoted to management training, systems, and research and were well attended and enthusiastically received by participants. More than 20 OCSE staff had a role in the conference as speakers and/or workshop coordinators.
In recognition of the hard work and dedication needed to meet system certification standards, OCSE Deputy Director David Gray Ross presented automated system certifications to Arizona, Connecticut, Utah, West Virginia, and Wyoming during the conference. Special awards were also presented to 10 front line child support enforcement workers-one from each region of the country-for outstanding individual achievements.
If you would like further information about NCSEA, or about this year's conference, call Heather Tonks at (202) 624 8180.
States and OCSE have worked as partners to ensure the success of the new hire pilot. Conference calls were conducted with states to answer questions and gain their support. States agreed to allow their cases currently in the Tax Refund Offset Program (TROP) and Federal Parent Locate Service (FPLS) to be matched with new hire data. They were encouraged to submit additional locate cases to FPLS to take advantage of this data. And states with new hire reporting programs were invited to submit their data for t he pilot and were given OCSE timeframes and tape specifications.
Twenty of the 26 new hire reporting states are providing new hire data to the pilot. "I was so pleased to see how quickly state and federal staff pitched in to make this effort successful," said Teresa Kaiser, IV D director in Missouri, one of the first states to send in data. Some states are unable to provide data, either because their laws preclude them from doing so or their systems are not yet automated.
The pilot is being conducted in two phases. The first phase matches new hire data with TROP cases. The second phase, matching data with cases currently in the FPLS, began in late September. In the first phase, as of this writing, new hire data from 10 states has been processed. States are provided information only on those cases which have been matched with another state's new hire data. So far, more than 52,000 delinquent obligors have been located in interstate cases-30,000 of whom are associated with AFDC cases.
"The number of matches is really impressive," said Donna Bonar, OCSE's Director of Program Operations, "given the fact that not all states are reporting data and that nationwide only a small fraction of employers report new hire information."
New welfare reform legislation requires employers and labor organizations to report name, address, social security number, and employer identification number on new hires to a State's Directory of New Hires within 20 days of the date of hiring. If you would like more information about new hire, or this pilot project, contact Karen Bartlett at (202) 401 4630.
Effective January 1, 1997, the new law requires parents involved in domestic relations litigation to attend an educational program focused on their children's needs.
Prior to that date, the presiding judge of the superior court in each Arizona county must adopt and implement an educational program consistent with minimum standards promulgated by the Arizona Supreme Court.
An interdisciplinary committee is being formed to develop standards, review county plans, and serve as an advisory group for the program.
For more information, contact Cheryl Lee at (602) 542 9253.
[Source: Domestic Relations Quarterly, Vol. II, No. 2, Summer, 1996. The DR Quarterly is distributed by the Arizona Supreme Court's Domestic Relations Division.]
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