Record Breaking Year for Child Support

White House Unveils Fatherhood Initiatives

• Collect child support from parents who can afford to pay;
• Ensure that more child support goes directly to families; and
• Provide funds to help more fathers who owe child support go to work.

The budget proposal includes $255 million for the first year of a new "Fathers Work/Families Win" initiative to help low-income noncustodial parents and low-income working families work and support their children.

Fathers Work

To ensure that low-income fathers who are not living with their children provide the financial and emotional support their children deserve, the Administration's budget will include $125 million for new "Fathers Work" grants. These grants will help approximately 40,000 low-income noncustodial parents (mainly fathers) work, pay child support, and reconnect with their children.

Families Win

To reward work and responsibility and ensure that all families benefit from the economy, the Administration's budget will include $130 million in new grants to help hard-pressed working families get the supports and skills they need to succeed on the job and avoid welfare. These funds will leverage existing resources to help families retain jobs and upgrade skills, and get connected to critical work supports, such as child care, child suppport, health care, food stamps, housing, and transportation.

Families Win grants will serve approximately 40,000 low-income families, including mothers and fathers, former welfare recipients, and people with disabilities. Within these funds, $10 million will be set aside for applicants from Native American workforce agencies.

In addition, to help more long-term welfare recipients and low-income fathers go to work and support their families, state, local, tribal, and community-and faith-based grantees will receive an additional two years to spend Welfare-to-Work funds, ensuring that roughly $2 billion in existing resources continues to help those most in need. For more information, see the White House Website at http://www.whitehouse.gov/WH/SOTUOO/.

President Announces New Enforcement Initiatives

The President announced in his State of the Union address new enforcement proposals that will collect an estimated $2 billion for children over the next five years. These measures included booting the cars and intercepting large gambling winnings of delinquent parents, denying passports to parents who owe more than $2,500 in past due support (lowering the amount from the current $5,000), prohibiting Medicare participation by providers who owe support, and requiring more frequent updating of child support orders.

For further information, see the White House Website at http://www.whitehouse.gov/WH/SOTUOO/.

Minnesota Partnership

Focused on the partnership between family support, Head Start, child care and fathers groups, more than 400 government, nonprofit, and community leaders met January 10-12, 2000 at the Minnesota Family Ties collaborative Summit in Bloomington. The partners were successful in efforts to tie together child support services with other services that provide emotional and financial support for children and their families.

A high point was a presentation by parents who shared their life experiences and the positive results for their families from child support services, Head Start, father's programs, Parents' Fair Share, and the Minnesota Family Investment (TANF) program.

Integrated within the Summit was a focus on fathers. According to Mary Anderson, sponsoring supervisor of the Summit, "Messages showed that fathers are important to their children but face many barriers to participating in their lives. The Summit made clear that we need to relate as partners to help fragile families become and stay self-sufficient."

"The Summit built the conceptual framework for more family-focused service delivery," said Laura Kadwell, Director of Minnesota's Child Support Enforcement Division. Added Joyce Thomas, the Midwest Hub Director for ACF's Chicago Regional Office, "Partnerships are essential because we need every one at the table to help meet the many needs of families."

Workshop sessions offered opportunities to learn more about existing programs and services, community issues and initiatives, judicial influences, and human development and child-parent relationships.

For more information contact Molly Crawford at 651-215-6279.

OCSE Receives Hammer Award

"The national directory and its dedicated federal staff are indispensable to the child support enforcement program, assuring that children receive the support they need and deserve," the Secretary said.

Under the program, the nation's 6.4 million employers report information on newly hired employees to their state child support agencies. States then forward the information, along with quarterly wage and unemployment insurance records, to the NDNH, an automated centralized repository of employment information.

"Receiving the Hammer Award is a tribute to an incredible partnership, including the team that worked so hard implementing a complex system on time and within budget, and to the millions of employers who make it work everyday," said Olivia A. Golden, HHS Assistant Secretary for Children and Families.

"I am very proud of the nation's child support workers and employers," said OCSE Commissioner David Gray Ross. "Together, we successfully implemented the National Directory of New Hires on time, thereby helping our ultimate customer, children in need. This is government-private sector partnership at its best."

Georgia Begins Training Program for New Employees

Classes, conducted at the Macon Training Center, began on July 12, 1999 for all employees hired or promoted on or after October 1, 1998. The CSE New Employee Training consists of seven training modules that range from two to four days each, covering:

• Overview of CSE and Caseload Management;
• Intake/Case Registration/Locate;
• Establishment;
• Enforcement;
• Financial;
• Interstate; and
• Review and Modification.

The first graduates of the program were recognized at a ceremony in Macon on December 2, 1999. Thus far, more than 77 newly hired or promoted CSE staff have successfully completed their required modules. Participant evaluations indicate the training program is well presented and very beneficial.

Arizona Receives Spirit of Excellence Award

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OCSE Names Deputy Commissioner

"We are very fortunate to have Frank join us in the Office of Child Support Enforcement," said Commissioner David Gray Ross. "His extensive experience in administering complex programs and his partnership-building skills will be superb additions to the nation's child support program. He possesses a genuine and long-standing desire to help children."

Most recently, Mr. Fuentes was the Deputy Associate Commissioner of ACF's Child Care Bureau. In his five years at the Bureau, he oversaw and directed the administration of the $3.1 billion Child Care and Development Fund, which serves 1.5 million children and their families. From 1989 to 1995, he directed the Migrant Head Start Program and over the years has held a variety of other positions of responsibility within DHHS.

The recipient of numerous honors and awards during his government service, Mr. Fuentes is married and the father of six children, including one adopted child. He and his wife also have been foster parents to 45 children.

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Child Support Population Estimates for the Years 1988 and 1998

Recently developed estimates of the child support population-children, parents who live with them, other adult custodians, and noncustodial parents-provide an interesting profile of child support populations in the United States. Between 1988 and 1998, the total number of children and their custodians eligible for child support grew by 32 percent, more than double the overall population growth rate.

Although the vast majority of custodians are parents (in 1998, 86 percent), the fastest growing segment of the child support population is made up of custodians who are not themselves the parents of the children for whom they care. The number of nonparent custodians increased 48 percent between 1988 and 1998, compared to 29 percent for child support eligible custodial parents. A substantial share of nonparent custodians are grandparents; in 1998, they represented 45 percent of all nonparent custodians.

Overall, one of every three children in the United States lives in a home with either no parents or only one parent. The families of such children are relatively impoverished, with low levels of education among the adults and high rates of poverty for the entire household.

In particular, never married custodians and their children face especially bleak economic conditions. For example, in 1998 almost half (46 percent) of never married custodians and their children lived in poverty. Past increases in nonmarital childbearing have made this group one of the fastest growing segments of the child support population. Custodians who are not the parents of the children they care for also tend to have especially poor economic outcomes, with 30 percent living in poverty in 1998.

Other findings from the data include:

• A small but significant number of noncustodial parents are in prison-5.4 percent in 1998;
• Just 39 percent of the children of noncustodial mothers live with the children's fathers, while almost 90 percent of the children of noncustodial fathers live with the children's mothers; and
• The use of public assistance among child support populations declined dramatically between 1988 and 1998, while poverty rates declined only slightly. For example, among never married custodial parents, the group most likely to be in poverty and receiving public assistance, public assistance utilization rates decreased from 45 percent in 1988 to 26 percent in 1998. Over the same time frame, poverty rates fell from 55 percent to 46 percent.

Source of data: March and April supplements of the Current Population Surveys, and the Bureau of Justice Statistics surveys of inmates (federal, state, and local).

Funding for this project is provided by OCSE's Division of Consumer Services.

Hans Johnson is a Demographer with Acumen LLC and the Public Policy Institute of California.

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Fragile Families

SDU Alternative Penalty

The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 (PRWORA) added a Title IV-D state plan requirement for states to establish a State Disbursement Unit (SDU) by October 1, 1998. (Section 312 (d) of PRWORA allowed states that process child support payments through local clerks of court until October 1, 1999 to establish an SDU.)

On November 28, 1999, the President signed into law the Consolidated Appropriations Act for FY 2000. Section 807 of this Act amended section 455 of the Social Security Act by adding a new subsection (a) (5), which provides an alternative penalty for states that fail to operate the SDU by the statutory deadlines.

OCSE issued Action Transmittal 00-03 on January 2000 to provide guidance to states requesting the SDU alternative penalty.

Requesting the Alternative Penalty

Under this new provision, the SDU alternative penalty is available to a state which:

• The Secretary determines has made and is continuing to make a good-faith effort to comply with SDU requirements; and
• Has submitted to the Secretary, not later than April 1, 2000, a corrective compliance plan (which the Secretary approves) that describes how, by when, and at what cost the state will achieve such compliance.

A state requesting this alternative penalty must send a letter from the state's Chief Executive Officer and the corrective compliance plan to OCSE Commissioner David Gray Ross with a copy to the appropriate Regional Administrator.

The Penalty Base

The amount of the alternative financial penalty is as follows:

• 4 percent of penalty base if the state fails to achieve compliance for the first fiscal year in which the failure by the state occurs;
• 8 percent of penalty base if the state fails to achieve compliance for the second such fiscal year;
• 16 percent of penalty base if the state fails to achieve compliance for the third such fiscal year;
• 25 percent of penalty base if the state fails to achieve compliance for the fourth such fiscal year;
• 30 percent of penalty base if the state fails to achieve compliance for the fifth or any subsequent such fiscal year.

The "penalty base" is the amount otherwise payable to the state (Federal share of expenditures) in the preceding fiscal year at the 66 percent matching rate for CSE administrative costs.

If a state complies with the SDU requirements before April 1, 2000 the Secretary shall waive the alternative penalty. If a state qualifying for an alternative penalty complies with the SDU requirements on or after April 1, 2000, and on or before September 30, 2000, the alternative penalty amount will be 1 percent of the penalty base.

Not Losing TANF Funds

These alternative financial penalties will be in lieu of the state plan disapproval process and subsequent termination of all IV-D funds related to a state's failure to meet the deadlines for establishing an SDU. States that meet the conditions for the alternative penalty will not be in jeopardy of losing TANF funds.

For further information, contact OCSE's Sheck Chin at (202) 260-5830.o

Florida's Multi-State Financial Institution Data Match (MSFIDM)

By: Mike Ellis

Using multistate FIDM matches between August 27, 1999 and January 25, 2000, Florida has frozen 508 accounts totaling $634,589. These freezes have resulted in 432 levies being completed to date, with total collections of $567,632. Seventeen percent of the levy actions represent a first ever payment from the noncustodial parent; seven percent resulted in a wage withholding order being established; three percent of the actions have collected enough money to pay off and close the case; and just one percent have contested the filing and requested an Administrative or Circuit Court hearing.

While State officials are pleased with these numbers, the real success of the program is the difference it makes in the lives of families. For example, a recent MSFIDM collection brought in $52,180 from an obligor who owed $56,334. And because this was a nonpublic assistance case, the custodial parent received the entire amount.

The Multi-State FIDM program is clearly moving Florida closer to its goal of, "More Money, To More Children, More Quickly."

OCSE Web Update

OCSE's Web based National Electronic Child Support Resource System (NECSRS) currently contains federal and state resource documents representing contributions from 45 states. Topics include policy, training, best practices, and research, and NECSRS now provides users the ability to search, locate, view, print, and download these resources via the Internet.

New features and materials include:

• Best Practices/Good Ideas: to view the most recent state innovative practices;
• Advanced Search: to access documents more easily and quickly, there are now three ways to search documents; and
• Training Curricula: Processing Interstate Cases, PRWORA's Distribution Requirements, and the IV-D Management Development Training.

If you haven't used NECSRS lately, give it a try. Go to OCSE's web site on the Internet (www.acf.dhhs.gov/programs/cse/), then click on the NECSRS Hyperlink.