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Undistributed Collections: A Texas Success Story

Realizing that parents rely heavily on child support to meet their children's basic needs, the Child Support Division of the Texas Attorney General's Office has reduced its undistributed collections by $8 million over a four-year period.

It has been a daunting task. In the fiscal year that ended August 31, 2002, the Child Support Division received more than 8.2 million payments totaling $1.4 billion. Although Federal law gives agencies two days to process and distribute payments, this fast turnaround has proved to be difficult to accomplish for a variety of reasons.

Incomplete information accompanying the payment, payment exceeding the amount owed, incorrect address, and insufficient information to link the payment to the proper case are a few of the reasons given for the delay of distribution.

The issue of undistributed collections has generated considerable interest among both parents and advocacy groups. Unfavorable publicity has sometimes accused state IV-D programs of purposely holding up child support payments.

In January 1999, Texas lawmakers began to raise serious questions about the $21 million listed in the undistributed column. Buoyed by the interest and a new Program Head and the Legislature, the Child Support Division went to work.

It was determined that the growth of undistributed collections began in September 1997. Texas converted to a new computer system that proved to be incapable of quickly updating case information required to release the money. It also included a "family-unfriendly" design that appeared to custodial parents to "hold their money hostage" until the completion of cumbersome nightly batch processes or manual efforts to release the funds. One year after the conversion to the new system, undistributed collections had reached the $21 million level.

A project team of more than thirty employees from every department of the Attorney General's Child Support Division began the effort to reduce undistributed collections by redesigning existing reports to provide a more detailed analysis - by category - of unreleased funds.

More robust reporting resulted in an array of automated and manual solutions to Texas' undistributed collections crisis that included: reducing the hold on intercepted IRS refund checks from 120 to 60 days; streamlining the automated process for updating cases to reflect new or modified child support orders; and automating the process for refunding excess payments made by non-custodial parents. The first run of the automated program designed to comply with the new IRS policy resulted in the release of more than $9 million to Texas families.

To confront the most frustrating category of undistributed collections - bad addresses or insufficient identifying information - Texas' Child Support Division developed new automated locator resources and enlisted the help of special enforcement officers. The special expertise of these officers, who usually work on cases involving high profile, criminal evaders, helped locate custodial parents who received $1.8 million.

By working to put families first, Texas reduced its undistributed collection from the $21 million level of 1998 to $13 million by 2002. During that same period of time, Texas' collections grew to $1.4 billion - an increase of 62 percent. All changes made by the Attorney General's Child Support Division to reduce undistributed collections are now a normal part of the child support program. Daily monitoring of every category of undistributed collections ensures that balances remain at an acceptable level - one percent of total child support collections.

The Texas program received the U.S. Office of Child Support Enforcement Commissioner's Award for High-Impact Problem Solving. The award was presented by Dr. Sherri Z. Heller for reducing undistributed collections amid other successful efforts that included increasing year-to-year child support collections by unprecedented amounts, and for implementing a state disbursement unit.

Commissioner Heller Interviews on "The Business of Government Hour"

Commissioner Sherri Z. Heller, Ed.D. was recently interviewed on "The Business of Government Hour" radio show hosted by Paul Lawrence, Co-Chair of the IBM Endowment for the Business of Government. Several social issues were discussed - The scope of child support issues facing the country and the effect on children not receiving child support were among them. Some of the topics discussed during the interview were:

• Sweeping revisions were established under the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA) of 1996 such as creation of the National Case Registry for New Hires and a National Case Registry.
• Child support evaders' bank accounts can be identified and seized through the use of the Multi-State Financial Institution Data Match (FIDM).
• Management of interstate cases has been greatly improved with the use of CSENet 2000.
• OCSE's successfully collaborated with other federal agencies.
• Our goal is to improve the lives of America's children by ensuring that they receive the financial and emotional support of both their parents. We measure our success by how we accomplish this goal. For example, in FY 2001, the number of cases with an order that resulted in a collection has doubled the number of that reported in 1997. Our numbers indicate that we are making progress.
• Significant improvements have been made in many of our enforcement and locate techniques, and we are working on new and innovative ideas to accomplish our goal of improving the lives of America's children in the next five to ten years.

The interview aired on April 19 in the DC area. It can be heard on the internet at: http://www.businessofgovernment.org/

Improving Service Delivery in Tough Times

To deal with budget reductions and hiring freezes, Georgia's Office of Child Support Enforcement (OCSE) is using Business Process Reengineering (BPR) to stretch its resources further and to provide its clients with more efficient services.

BPR combines both the analysis and the redesign of how an organization conducts its business to achieve improvements in performance measures. The method uses models which may require abandoning long established procedures and taking a fresh look at the work required to create a product, or perform a service.

Georgia OCSE began using BPR in July 2001. From July through September, managers statewide conducted a BPR analysis of all aspects of the child support program. Major recommendations included: workload efficiency management, improving current computer systems, eliminating redundant/unnecessary work, revised performance metrics and development of a "testing environment."

During a statewide OCSE Managers' Conference in November 2001, attendees brainstormed possible projects and implemented a testing methodology. Projects were assigned to existing Quality Task Forces. The projects were tested from January through June of 2002. Selected projects and their results were highlighted at Georgia's Annual Training Seminar in August 2002.

Local child support offices tested 30 projects in several areas, including staff work, financial ADP processing systems, and customer service:

• 12 projects affecting staff effectiveness
• 6 projects concerning financial areas
• 3 projects concerning systems issues
• 2 customer service projects.

The goal of one of the customer service projects was to increase the scope of duties performed by the OCSE Hotline operators in order to enhance local office productivity. A large urban office and a small/medium rural office were selected to pilot the project. The offices tracked the number of phone calls received, enforcement actions taken and paternity establishment actions implemented for three months prior to the project to be used for comparison purposes. Training was provided to the Hotline operators for their new duties prior to the start of the project. The daily logs maintained by the Hotline operators were modified to enable them to track the calls for the BPR project offices so that the additional duties could be monitored.

The project resulted in both offices reporting an overall increase in their productivity, including:

• 45 percent increase in new orders
• 46 percent increase in overall enforcement actions
• 36 percent increase in contempt actions
• 50 percent increase in license suspensions
• 39 percent increase in court collections.

"Those closest to a problem know best how to fix the problem," says OCSE Director Robert Riddle. "Failure is okay, but continuing a failed or failing process is not okay."

For more information about Georgia's BPR projects and results, contact Robert Swain at 404-657-0634 or rgswain@dhr,state.ga.us.

New Mexico Demonstration Grant Nets Successes

By: Donald Levering

Dramatic increases in paternity and support order establishment in New Mexico are largely credited to a Federal 1115 Grant project.

The grant - Comprehensive Outreach Supporting Paternity and Support Order Entry in New Mexico - was awarded to the New Mexico Child Support Enforcement Division (CSED). The original grant was awarded in late September 2001 and to end February 2003. The total grant award was fully used as of February 2003, however, the state received a no-cost extension until February 2004 to continue the project. The project goals are to increase the number of support and paternity orders established and to conduct outreach to the State's Hispanic population.

Deputy Division Director Helen Nelson noted that since 42.1% of New Mexico's population is Hispanic, "The idea behind the outreach component is to ensure that New Mexico Hispanics are aware of the services offered by CSED, and that every effort is made to gather the information needed to obtain paternity and support orders for these families."

Jason Romero, Office Manager for the project added, "The theory is that there may be unintentional barriers to understanding the program for some Hispanics, particularly those who do not speak English. We've had Spanish customers who thought that CSED intended to take away their children."

According to the Hispanic Outreach Coordinator, Rebecca Tafoya, the project's first steps were the hiring of bilingual project staff; the development and distribution statewide of a bilingual brochure that offers very basic information about CSED, what it does, and how to contact it; and translating the CSED application into Spanish.

Ms. Tafoya contacted government entities such as the Children, Youth and Families Department and the Spanish interpreters in the courts, as well as the Hispanic Bar Association, Headstart, and charitable organizations. She met with groups and appeared at various functions distributing the new Hispanic materials. Hispanic news media outlets were contacted and links to Hispanic-oriented web sites were obtained.

Preliminary results of the Outreach are encouraging, showing an increase of 60% of Spanish speaking calls to the CSED Call Center.

To achieve the other project goal - increasing support and paternity orders - CSED targeted Support Order Percentage as a Federal Performance Measure as needing special attention. The strategy adopted was to use a joint state/contractor team, half of whom speak Spanish, to separate "backlog" unobligated cases from the general caseload, solicit fresh information from the custodial parents (CPs), and gather the information necessary for non-project staff to prepare and file establishment petitions.

A total of 34,453 unobligated cases with no recent locate or legal activity were identified. In many instances, CSED had either lost touch with the CP or had outdated locate information on the non-custodial parent (NCP). A bilingual questionnaire was produced and mailed to the CPs. For those questionnaires that were returned as undeliverable, the Team began the case closure process. Completed questionnaires were followed up with phone calls, research on income information, and NCP and employer locate activities. A checklist developed for the project was used to verify that cases were ready to be turned over to the project attorney for quality review. Upon attorney approval, the cases were transferred back to field offices for preparation of petitions and filing.

The results of the demonstration project are impressive. Following Federal regulations, about 15,000 of the almost 35,000 cases were closed (chiefly due to CP non-cooperation), and locate or other appropriate actions were begun on the other approximately 20,000 cases.

Of special note is the fact that New Mexico increased its obligated IV-D caseload by 10% in FFY'02. "While some of this percentage gain is attributable to the large number of cases closed under the project," noted Nelson, "what is really exciting is that the actual number of orders entered increased 36% in FFY'02 over FFY'01." This was possible, according to Nelson, because the Grant Team provided CSED establishment workers new, verified information from which to draft petitions.

The figures for IV-D Paternity Establishment have also shown significant improvement during the project. CSED increased performance on the IV-D Paternity Establishment measure by 8.5% during FFY'02, while the actual number of paternities in the IV-D caseload increased 53% in FFY'02 over FFY'01.

Increasing Productive Work Among TANF and Child Support Staff

In concert with OCSE priorities, based on a need identified by a local child support worker, John Clark conceptualized for Region III, an approach to enhance collaboration between Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) and Child Support Enforcement (CSE) representatives in Pennsylvania. Recently, a meeting was convened involving five large Pennsylvania counties: Philadelphia, Berks, Montgomery, Bucks and Delaware. In addition to the State Directors of TANF and CSE, there were county directors and other management staff from all the counties participating.

The Region, along with State officials, presented an overview of TANF and CSE, the changes that have occurred, problems in TANF/CSE collaboration, and the statistically significant correlation that exists between the payment of child support and a family not re-applying for TANF.

All parties were surprised to learn of the changes in the programs. Best practices were highlighted. Berks County was identified as a best practice, and for having an effective training process conducted in western Pennsylvania involving TANF and CSE workers. This joint training of child support and TANF workers has reduced the number of incorrect referrals. There were 204 cases with incorrect referral information sent to the Pennsylvania Child Support Enforcement System (PACSES) before the training and only 97 after the training. This represented more than a 50 percent reduction in the number of cases with incorrect referral information. Staff in TANF had not realized the importance of correct coding in order to have effective child support referrals.

Evaluations of the meeting pointed to three indicators of success. First, there was unanimous support for a follow-up meeting in May to look at specific methods to improve collaboration between TANF and CSE, and possible replication of the successful training held in western Pennsylvania. Second, contingent on available funding, TANF and CSE Directors are interested in conducting similar meetings throughout Pennsylvania. Third, one county, where the relationship between TANF and CSE was weak, met after the meeting to discuss ways to improve its performance. Another county has scheduled a meeting for late April.

In collaboration with the Regional Office, Pennsylvania is planning to use some of its TANF Rapid Response funds to bring in state CSE and TANF Directors to discuss using this method in other states.

State Websites with information on Military deployment/activation.

1. Alaska - http://www.csed.state.ak.us/ (see Reservists, National Guard - Are you being mobilized?)
2. Arizona - https://newhirereporting.com/az-newhire/default.asp (Arizona New Hire Reporting)
3. Florida - http://sun6.dms.state.fl.us/dor/childsupport/ (Attention Recently Activated Military Personnel)
4. Iowa - https://childsupport.dhs.state.ia.us/whatsnew.asp (Select "What's New")
5. Maine - http://www.state.me.us/dhs/bfi/dser/ (Announcements)
6. Maryland - https://newhirereporting.com/SharedPages/reservistsToDuty.asp?State=MD (MD New Hire Registry)*
7. Massachusetts - http://www.cse.state.ma.us/ (Military Package)
8. Minnesota - http://www.dhs.state.mn.us/ecs/ChildSupport/Default.htm (Information for members of reserve and National Guard)
9. Missouri - http://www.dss.state.mo.us/cse/cse.htm (Attention Reserve and National Guard Soldiers)
10. Montana - http://www.dphhs.state.mt.us/about_us/divisions/child_support_enforcement/child_support_enforcement.htm (Attention Reserve and National Guard Soldiers)
11. Nebraska - http://www.hhs.state.ne.us/cse/cseindex.htm (Employers: If your employee is called up for active duty......)
12. Nevada - http://www.welfare.state.nv.us/child/childlinks.htm (Reservists, National Guard - Are you being mobilized?)
13. New Jersey - http://www.njchildsupport.org/ (A link is provided for child support information on recently activated National Guard and Reserve Soldiers)
14. North Dakota - http://lnotes.state.nd.us/dhs/dhsweb.nsf/ServicePages/ChildSupportEnforcement (Military Call to Active Duty)
15. Oregon - http://dcs.state.or.us/ (OCSE list Reservists Rights and Responsibilities)
16. South Dakota - http://www.state.sd.us/social/CSE/index.htm (Attention Reserve and National Guard Soldiers)
17. Texas - http://www.oag.state.tx.us/child/mainchil.shtml (Two sites: Military Reservists and National Guard and Employers of Military Reservists and National Guard)
18. Virginia - http://www.dss.state.va.us/news/military.html (Services for Active Duty Personnel)**
19. Washington - http://www.wa.gov/dshs/dcs/index.html (Child Support Information for Recently Activated Military Personnel)
20. Wisconsin - http://www.dwd.state.wi.us/bcs/ (Military Deployment)
21. Wyoming - https://newhirereporting.com/wy-newhire/default.asp (New Hire Reporting Center)

* Maryland New Hire Reporting Page

** Virginia State Web Site

Butler County Ads Target Offenders, Produce Results

The Butler County, Ohio Child Support Enforcement Agency (CSEA) received an overwhelming response to its use of the media in an effort to step up the apprehension of child support offenders with arrest warrants. On Father's Day, June 21, 1999, a list of parents with warrants was published in five local newspapers. This was done with the hope that either the individuals listed would turn themselves in or people in the community would recognize the offenders and provide the CSEA with locate information.

As a result of this ad, nine parents were arrested. Since then, on each Father's Day, Butler County has published similar ads. In 2002, 73 offenders were arrested in a one-month period after the ad was published.

The agency has also published an ad entitled, "Not paying your child support? Your license may be suspended." The ad listed drivers who licenses were suspended for not paying their court-ordered child support. As a result of this ad, calls were received from parents who decided to pay. "Publishing the names of parents who fail to support their children has proven very successful," said CSEA Director Daniel Cade.

Butler County CSEA has produced other forms of outreach materials: wanted posters, brochures, videos, and a website.

Two videos were recently designed and developed. One, "A Bright Future," is mailed to residential parents of all newly opened cases. The other, "When One Parent is Absent," is used for outreach/educational presentations to community and collaboration groups.

Over the past few years, the Butler County community has seen a continual growth in its Hispanic population. To effectively serve this customer base, the CSEA has produced Spanish editions of its publications.

Butler County CSEA received two Best Practice Awards at the 2002 Ohio Family Support Association Conference. The agency was recognized for its outreach videos and imaging project.

Colorado Success Story

By: Arnold Erikson

Colorado reports success on a Multi-state FIDM account totaling $48,000.

A noncustodial parent owed over $262,000 and had never paid any child support. Colorado child support enforcement found an employer in the fall of 2002. FIDM was able to locate numerous accounts, full of money, at about the same time. Only one account was attachable, a retirement account with over $48,000 in it. The noncustodial parent hired two separate law firms to fight the FIDM action. The Financial Institution was so intimidated by the noncustodial parent's attorneys, that it held the money for over 6 months, while the attorneys for the noncustodial parent, the attorneys for the financial institution and the Colorado Attorney General's office "slugged it out." Colorado finally won (after the noncustodial parent spent thousands of dollars in attorney's fees) and recently received a $48,174.26 payment from the retirement account. The FIDM action also persuaded the noncustodial parent to finally enter into a payment plan with the Colorado Child Support Enforcement Agency.

OCSE FY 2001 Statistical Report

The full OCSE FY 2001 statistical report is now on the OCSE web site at:

/programs/cse/pubs/2003/reports/statistical_report/

Articles for the Child Support Report

When submitting an article for the Child Support Report, please consider including a picture.

Editor's Correction

The "BrownBag" article in the February, 2003 issue had an incorrect website. The correct site is: http://ocse.acf.hhs.gov/necsrspub/federal/training/index.cfm