(NOTE: Includes Findings from the Final Report)

This 17-month project addressed 2005 Priority Area 4: Use of Specific Collaboration Protocols with Other Agencies. The Arizona Division of Child Support Enforcement (DCSE) developed and implemented a web-based arrears calculation tool (e-Calc) that would allow courts, customers and IV-D staff to better manage child support arrears by providing timely, accurate information provided by the State Case Registry and the State Disbursement Unit. The project was a collaborative effort that included DCSE, the Maricopa County Family Court, the Arizona Attorney General’s office and the Arizona Administration of Courts.

Most Notable Features: The eCalc tool calculates arrears on-demand and in real-time, based on the information provided by the State Case Registry and State Disbursement Unit. The tool eliminates the need for members of the judiciary to reschedule hearings to obtain the current arrears amount and allows for immediate recalculation of arrears based on testimony presented in court. The tool reduces IV-D staff time by calculating arrears in complex cases and because custodial and noncustodial parents can easily obtain details about the amount of support owed, there is no need to contact the IV-D agency or a Clerk of the Court for arrears information. All customers with an Arizona court order, including those with an Arizona case who no longer reside in the state, are able to access the tool 24 hours-a-day/7 days-a-week.

Project Plan: The principal objectives of the project were as follows:

• Create a flexible, interactive, user friendly, real-time web-based arrearage calculator.
• Develop a calculator that would use the information provided by the State Case Registry (SCR) and State Disbursement Unit (SDU) for both IV-D and non-IV-D cases.
• Design a user-friendly tool for custodial and noncustodial parents that would significantly reduce the time required to create a detailed arrearage calculation.
• Provide a tool that could be used in court to immediately calculate or recalculate child support arrears and eliminate the need to reschedule court hearings because a new arrearage calculation cannot be produced immediately.
• Provide a tool permitting private attorneys to assist their IV-D and non IV-D clients by producing a standard arrearage calculation.
• Provide a tool that can be used by obligors to determine the details of what they owe, including interest, with the goal of encouraging payment on arrearage balances.

Project Findings: Within the first four months of implementation, the eCalc demonstrated some promising results:

• As designed, eCalc required no overnight batch processing, with results produced immediately, in real time.
• In 100% of the cases, the eCalc produced real time web-based arrearage calculations.
• In 100% of the cases, the eCalc obtained its information from the State Case Registry and read the State Disbursement Unit payment information.
• eCalcs were calculated in 64% of the time it took staff to calculate an ARCA (previous mainframe tool). eCalc required an average of 48 minutes, and an ARCA required an average of 75 minutes.
• For the 399 cases studied, there was a savings of 472 days of processing time with the use of eCalc versus the previous method.
• In 97% of the cases studied, the results of the eCalc were found to be as accurate as or more accurate than ARCA.
• Staff have begun using the eCalc on a regular basis.
• eCalc reduces or eliminates the need for court officials to continue hearings because it is able to produce real time web-based arrearage calculations with no need for batch processing.

Who Can Access eCalc: Members of the judiciary, Clerks of Court, IV-D staff and parents have the ability to access the tool.

Lessons Learned: Usage of the eCalc was initially below expectations. This pointed to a need for additional training and assistance, particularly for those parents and partners who have limited or no prior experience calculating debts. Surveys were developed to solicit input from case participants and staff to gauge whether or not they believed the eCalc tool was easy to use, and if they believed they could trust the results. Survey results helped further refine training requirements. DCSE took steps to develop additional tools and training to address this issue including:

• “How to” instructions for parents to be loaded into the FAQ section on eCalc.
• Demonstrations of the eCalc tool to 63 judges/commissioners.
• Train-the-Trainer session for 11 Clerks of Court staff and two Administrative Office of the Courts staff. The purpose of the training was to help partners develop the necessary expertise to train their own staff in the use of the eCalc tool.
• An unintended outcome of the research was that eCalc was able to identify data integrity issues in the automated State system and the non IV-D State Case Registry, giving DCSE, its partners, and the Clerks of Court an opportunity to address those issues. Because eCalc is very sensitive to the data that is entered by the Clerks of Court and IV-D staff, eCalc has resulted in providing a Quality Assurance tool that can now be used by all staff involved in child support arrears calculations.

Since the grant ended, DCSE has put together a workgroup with representatives from the Attorney General’s Office, the Administrative Office of the Courts, the county Clerks of Court, and DCSE staff to solicit input to further increase usage. Some of the concerns the workgroup addressed dealt with how information was presented. DCSE is adding different “views” of how information is displayed. For example, each type of obligation will have its own monthly total, overpayments and refunds of overpayments will be presented differently and beginning and ending balances will be more clearly explained to the user.

Technology Transfer Evaluation: Arizona contacted a state with which they share many cases to get their input on eCalc. In the partner state’s estimation, eCalc appears to be portable, “straightforward, well organized, and well structured.” In their opinion, they believed that, “from the technical perspective, any other state that makes use of a J2EE/Java Web environment could probably implement the foundation of what Arizona has built. The challenge of transferability lies with state-specific rules and regulations. If a State is willing to change a few of its procedures, where the law allows, the eCalc application from Arizona could be used for the arrears calculation in the transfer state.” However, they noted that adaptations may have to be made to accommodate rules and regulations.

Here is the link the home page of Arizona’s eCalc https://azecalc.gov/ecalc/Hello.htm

Also see article in May 2006 Child Support Report at: http://www.acf.hhs.gov/programs/cse/pubs/2006/csr/csr0605.pdf

This project is responsive to 2005 Priority Area 2: Developing a Comprehensive System of Early Intervention That Will Avoid Future Problems. The Colorado Division of Child Support Enforcement (CDCSE) proposes to conduct a three-year project aimed at improving the voluntary payment of support, reducing arrears and increasing the reliability of child support collections among Temporary Assistance for Needy Families clients. As part of the proposed project, three county child support agencies will contact parents with new or newly modified orders to identify potential barriers to payment. Parents will also be contacted when payments are missed to determine if a modification, job referral or other adjustment is needed.

In addition to the strategies noted above, Colorado will evaluate the impact of the new low-income adjustment to its child support guideline on payment behavior among low-income non-custodial parents by comparing payment behavior for samples of low-income obligors prior to and following January 2003 when the provision became effective.

To test the effectiveness of these interventions, cases in each county will be randomly assigned to conventional and experimental treatment categories and both will be compared for rates of child support payment, enforcement activity and arrears balances. A qualitative analysis will also be conducted to document implementation in the three counties and to assess staff reactions to the project in the participating child support agencies and courts. Interviews will also be conducted with custodial and non-custodial parents to assess reactions to simplified modification procedures and outreach efforts by child support staff.

This three-year project responds to 2005 Priority Area 1: Reducing Intervention and Use of Adversarial or Formal Proceedings While Increasing Financial Security for Children Born Out of Wedlock. The Hawaii Department of Attorney General, Child Support Enforcement Agency (CSEA) proposes to develop an innovative project, Kauka'i Ka 'Ohana (Strength in Families), that will form a collaborative approach between the IV-D and TANF agencies. The goal is to reach unwed parents prior to the establishment of a child support order to educate them on their parental responsibilities and the importance of marriage, and to assist them in making better choices and a parenting plan for their child.

The project will include three major components: specialized case managers co-located in the TANF agency; community outreach and education; and research and analysis. The project will be in Honolulu County and will include a rigorous process and impact analysis, including random assignment of cases to the specialized case managers.

This three-year grant responds to 2005 Priority Area 1: Reducing Intervention and Use of Adversarial or Formal Proceedings While Increasing Financial Security for Children Born Out of Wedlock.

Maryland's Community Services Administration (CSA) and Child Support Enforcement Administration (CSEA) have partnered with the Center for Fathers, Families, and Workforce Development (CFFWD) in Baltimore to implement a project that is intended to strengthen the relationships of low-income, unwed parents. This will be accomplished through the provision of eight-week training seminars for unwed parents with young children and based upon a culturally-appropriate curriculum developed by CFFWD entitled "Examining Relationships and Marriage with Fragile Families." Approximately 120 unwed mothers and fathers have been targeted for participation in the healthy relationship training per year.

This project will be evaluated by an outside contractor to analyze the extent to which this demonstration program was able to achieve the following outcomes: enhanced parents' interpersonal skills; increased likelihood that parents maintained a positive opinion of the training and its applicability to their well-being; greater likelihood that unwed couples will stay together; less involvement of parents with the TANF and Child Support programs; increase in paternities established; and increased likelihood that both parents will be able to financially and emotionally provide for their children.

This three-year grant responds to 2005 Priority Area 1: Reducing Intervention and Use of Adversarial or Formal Proceedings While Increasing Financial Security for Children Born Out of Wedlock. The grantee will work with the Administrative Office of the Court (AOC) to identify unmarried parents with access and visitation (AV) concerns and provide them the necessary services to enhance parental relationships, parent-child contact, and to avoid adversarial proceedings. A parenting specialist (PS) will be placed in each of three child support offices in Nashville, Chattanooga, and Jackson/Lexington/Henderson area, representing both urban and rural judicial districts. Unmarried parents with access and visitation issues will be identified and randomly assigned to either a low-level treatment (receive a packet of information and referrals) or a high-level treatment (in-depth needs assessment, case management, educational programs facilitated by PS, and other service referrals). A random assignment outcome evaluation will compare payment activity, paternity acknowledgement, established child support orders, and enforcement actions across the two treatment groups.

This three-year project responds to 2005 Priority Area 1: Reducing Intervention and Use of Adversarial or Formal Proceedings While Increasing Financial Security for Children Born Out of Wedlock. The Division for Families and Children of the Texas Office of the Attorney General (OAG) proposes a project to intervene with young, unmarried parents immediately prior to and following the birth of their babies in order to lay the foundation for a stable family and marriage, promote the long-term financial security of children born out-of-wedlock, and reduce adversarial child support proceedings.

Strong Start - Stable Families (SSSF), involves providing a menu of family stabilization services and referrals to both expectant and newly delivering mothers and fathers in conjunction with regular prenatal and postpartum clinic visits and services. The interventions will include: education on paternity establishment, child support, and preparation for parenting; and services and referrals on healthy/stable relationships, marriage preparation and healthy marriage skills, child health and well-being, family economic security, the prevention of family violence, and team-parenting.

Parents who are randomly assigned to the high-level treatment group will receive assessment, case management, and the full array of services noted above including home visiting services as appropriate. Parents in the low-level treatment group will receive printed family development information and access to free healthy relationship/marriage skills educational groups, and referrals to additional family support services in the community. A control group will receive no services beyond those usually accorded at prenatal and postpartum visits. The three groups will be tracked and compared for evidence of family and financial security, paternity establishment, incidences of relationship violence, marriage, cohabitation, earnings, enrollment in public benefit programs, involvement in the child welfare system, agreed child support orders, and child support payment.

The SSSF Project will be housed in the six Baylor College of Medicine Teen Health Clinics. Other project partners include the Houston Healthy Marriage Coalition, Gulf Coast Workforce Development Board, Greater Houston Collaborative for Children, Texas Council on Family Violence, the Texas Health and Human Services Commission.

Project Plan

This grant responded to 2005 Priority Area 4: Use of Specific Collaboration Protocols with Other Agencies. The purpose of this 17-month demonstration grant was to improve Utah's paternity establishment rate as measured by the statewide PEP Ratio on the OCSE 157 Report. Utah's IV-D program, the Office of Recovery Services (ORS), partnered with Utah's Office of Vital Records and Statistics (OVRS) to achieve this objective.

The approach contained two main components:

1. Paternity Matters, a community outreach group devoted to educating the public about paternity establishment issues; and
2. PATER (PATernity Establishment Registry), technological system to be shared between ORS and OVRS for the storage and retrieval of paternity establishment information.

The overriding theories behind these two projects were:

• Better education about paternity issues would lead to increased paternity establishments; and,
• Improved access to information about established paternities would add efficiencies to IV-D processes, allowing for an increased number of paternity establishments.

Overall Results
Utah's statewide PEP Ratio improved from 83.5% in FY 2005 to 112.2% in FY 2006 as a combined result of all of the projects described herein and the inclusion of adoptions for the first time.

Project Findings

1. Paternity Matters Activities
   For the Paternity Matters project, hospital birth certificate specialists were surveyed by an independent research group to identify attitudes toward paternity issues that may affect a hospital's success rate and to obtain feedback about what the front-line workers perceived to be the barriers to paternity establishment in the hospital at the time of birth. Based on the survey responses, Paternity Matters focused on educating hospital birth certificate specialists about all methods of paternity establishment and services offered to parents by Utah's IV-D program; updating the documents associated with the in-hospital paternity establishment process; determining if hospitals had the necessary equipment to show OCSE video "The Power of Two," and developing new educational materials about paternity establishment to teach single parents about paternity establishment before they reach the hospital.
   Fourteen hospitals were identified for additional attention. The Paternity Matters Outreach Liaison made frequent personal contact to ensure that these hospitals had the knowledge and supplies needed to complete the in-hospital establishment process with parents. Extra emphasis was given to ensuring that the hospital workers knew that ORS was aware of and appreciative of their paternity establishment efforts. The personal relationships formed with the hospital birth certificate specialists provided Paternity Matters with additional insight to each hospital, and allowed for development of customized educational materials to meet specific needs.
   Paternity Matters utilized existing staff, readily available desktop publishing and graphic design programs, cost-conscious design techniques, and careful comparison of printing options to maximize the number of new materials created within a limited budget. By seeking out hidden talents and unknown resources within ORS and its umbrella agency, the Department of Human Services, Paternity Matters was able to develop a new website and film four public service announcements, in addition to developing many new printed materials, to make paternity establishment information available to the public on a much wider basis.
   
   Paternity Matters Results
   The Paternity Matters project resulted in overall increases to in-hospital paternity establishment cumulative rates at 11 of the 14 target hospitals, and resulted in upward trends in the monthly statistics at 10 of the 14 target hospitals. Those increases were mirrored in the statewide hospital completion rates, which went from 41.92% in calendar year 2004 to 51.66% through June, 2007. Utah will maintain the Paternity Matters program permanently.
2. PATER Activities
   The PATER project was divided into four main components to meet the differing needs of ORS and OVRS:
   • OVRS Fax-to-Imaging System: designed to facilitate collection, database update, and imaged storage of completed in-hospital establishments from all hospitals;
   • BMI Query/Viewer: designed to allow IV-D employees remote access to imaged paternity documents stored by OVRS;
   • ORSIS to OVRS Automated Data Exchange: designed to allow IV-D employees to search for birth records from a new screen within the child support computer system, and to automate the process of reporting new paternity establishments by judicial, administrative or out-of-state orders; and,
   • ORS Imaging: designed originally to image ORS paternity establishments and documentation, the project was expanded to image the entire child support caseload due to the powerful capabilities of the software selected.

   The design process for each component started by examining the pathway followed by each type of paternity establishment from its beginning (i.e., finalization by a judge) to its ideal end (storage with Utah's State Registrar, OVRS). This analysis pinpointed several potential problems, such as the possibility of losing paper documents being passed from worker to worker, the possibility of human error when manually entering data, the lack of electronic prompts and edits to remind workers to take appropriate steps, the possibility of increased errors or dropped processes due to switching computer systems mid-process, and the lack of audit trails. Correcting these potential problems was the design focus in each of the PATER components. Each component and its results are described below. OVRS Fax-to-Imaging System and BMI Query/Viewer (components one and two): These solutions involved using existing software and office equipment, making fairly minor changes to existing OVRS programs, and purchasing a new server to increase storage capacity for current and future paternity establishment images. The improvement in the OVRS Fax-to-Imaging component resulted in a process where the in-hospital establishment can be signed by the parent at the hospital in the morning, the document transmitted to OVRS using a regular fax machine, the information updated on the child's birth record, and the image added to the storage server, all within minutes. Due to the BMI Query/Viewer component, once the paternity establishment image is available on the OVRS server, IV-D workers have immediate, direct access to the image from their desktops.

   ORSIS to OVRS Automated Data Exchange (component three): This solution involved linking the ORS computer system (ORSIS) to OVRS birth record databases by way of a third program, CHARM (Child Health Advanced Record Management), a data-sharing platform already linked to the OVRS databases. The link from ORSIS to CHARM and the creation of new screens within ORSIS provided a way for IV-D workers to search OVRS birth records for paternity establishment information and, conversely, for IV-D workers to easily transmit establishment information to OVRS. The link also created a way for ORS to build its own tables, which would store the birth record information needed to generate the OCSE 157 Report and allow ORS to query birth record data for future educational projects.

   ORS Imaging (component four): This solution used new imaging programs developed by Kofax®. Using advanced optical character recognition and a model consisting of thousands of sample documents, the INDICIUS program was capable of grouping images into complete documents and assigning the documents the correct form name. This minimized the manual document manipulation and naming procedures normally required in imaging projects. The efficiencies achieved through this program allowed ORS to completely image its entire child support caseload of 76,998 cases (not just the paternity establishment documents as originally anticipated) in eight months. In addition, ORS implemented a digital mailroom to facilitate future document storage and prevent paperwork build-up and loss.

(NOTE: Includes Findings from the Final Report)

This 17-month project responded to Priority Area 4: Use of Specific Collaboration Protocols with Other Agencies, and involved the development of cooperative protocols among Vermont's Child Support, Medicaid, and Temporary Assistance for Needy Families agencies to increase and expedite medical support order establishment and enforcement. The goal was to develop and demonstrate best practices for the most efficient and effective means of establishing and enforcing medical support, generating data reports to answer national questions related to medical support impacts, and fulfilling OCSE-157 data reporting requirements.

Project Objectives

Objective (1): to increase and expedite medical support order establishment and enforcement, a workgroup was formed comprised of three key partners: the Vermont Office of Child Support (VT OCS), Economic Services Division (ESD), and the Office of Vermont Health Access (OVHA). The partnership or collaborative to develop a medical support system was sealed through a Memorandum of Agreement (MOA).

Objective (2): to collect and analyze data on project effectiveness, involved the development of a data mining model to answer the question "which noncustodial parents (NCPs) are likely to secure private health insurance?" System programming was accomplished through a competitive bid contract.

Findings (from the Final Report)

• IV-D agencies should screen cases before processing. Initially, the interface failed to identify cases that did not meet Federal medical support enforcement criteria. This caused a number of cases to open in error and VT OCS suffered a significant drop in Federal performance. VT OCS has since taken affirmative action to review cases before activating the Medicaid data.
• VT OCS discovered a correlation between the acquisition of private health insurance and NCP employment changes. The data mining model that VT OCS deployed showed that NCPs who have had recent job changes are more likely to have private health insurance than NCPs who have had consistent employment. This could be partially due to VT OCS’ sending the National Medical Support Notice (NMSN) only when notified of the NCP’s new employer. VT OCS will look at ways to update medical information for NCPs who maintain long-term employment with the same employer.
• A collaborative effort among the TANF, Child Support, and Medicaid partners is critical to success. The DCF-OVHA Workgroup met monthly and worked to increase the number of Medicaid case referrals to VT OCS. To accomplish this task, the Workgroup revised the Child and Medical Support Authorization Form to include language regarding Medicaid assignment and created a Medical Support Authorization Form for Medicaid-only cases. Once the forms were in place, the Workgroup developed and implemented the referral process. In turn, VT OCS increased the number of case referrals to OVHA for Medicaid cost recovery. The Workgroup also designed collaborative system programming and participated in data sharing. The DCF-OVHA Workgroup will continue to meet twice a year to review data and processes to ensure that progress continues.
• Private health insurance is most often ordered by the court when the cost is deemed reasonable. VT OCS implemented system programming that collected information on private health insurance availability to the NCP and custodial parent (CP). The data indicate that for both the NCP and CP, private health insurance is most often not available due to unemployment. When, during a court appearance, health insurance is not available, the court will order it to be provided if it becomes available at a reasonable cost in the future. At that time, the court would allocate unreimbursed medical expenses between the parties. The data suggest when an NCP is obligated to provide health insurance and a NMSN has been sent, the primary reasons for lack of enrollment are that employers do not offer coverage or that the NCP is no longer employed by that employer.
• The data suggest that cash medical support obligations may be the best avenue for reimbursing Medicaid costs and assisting families in paying medical costs. Based on data retrieved March 14 of 2008, 5,270 or 25% of VT OCS’ active caseload of 20,961 cases showed potential to have insurance plan information for NCPs. Of this 25%, the court ordered only 13%; no order was established for the remaining 12% because health insurance was not available at reasonable costs, or for miscellaneous other reasons. This information suggests that only a small subset of NCPs had insurance available through employment. Fewer VT employers are offering health insurance and those who do are increasing the premium thus making insurance too costly for low-wage employees. In these situations, cash medical obligations should be pursued. VT OCS is drafting a rule to assist in processing cash medical support obligations.

Lessons Learned

• National Medical Support Notices (NMSN) should be sent out on a periodic basis when insurance is not being provided.
• IV-D agencies should screen cases for insufficiencies before processing. This refers to NCPs who receive disability benefits, TANF, food stamps, and that may be incarcerated and therefore are unlikely to have medical insurance available.
• Automate the NMSN process to enable more effective medical support enforcement. Systematically re-contact employers who have long-term employees who did not have health insurance at the time the support order was established as some employers will offer insurance to these longer-term employees. This differs from automatically sending an NMSN when a NCP changes employers.
• Create one assignment form that covers Medicaid and TANF.

This three-year grant responds 2005 Priority Area 1: Reducing Intervention and Use of Adversarial or Formal Proceedings While Increasing Financial Security for Children Born Out of Wedlock. The grantee proposes to strengthen and expand Washington State's pioneering and nationally-replicated work in voluntary paternity establishment. The project is designed to implement four demonstration projects in ten of the State's field offices. The selected offices will enter into a cooperative agreement to test the provision of strengthened voluntary paternity services and new accompanying services (genetic testing and marriage education or dispute resolution services) in hospitals involving both IV-D and non-IV-D families. The overall objective is to foster an increase in paternities and reduce the need for future adversarial actions in child support matters.

This three-year project responds to 2005 Priority Area 1: Reducing Intervention and Use of Adversarial or Formal Proceedings While Increasing Financial Security for Children Born Out of Wedlock. The State of Wisconsin proposes to test whether legal services provided to non-custodial parents early in the child support process will improve their interactions with their children and the custodial parent and result in an increase of regular collections.

The project will test whether advocacy will overcome the critical factors that lead low-income non-custodial parents into adversarial or formal proceedings. The grantee will provide advocacy services at the child support system's front-end, thereby reducing the need to later initiate or pursue adversarial action. The demonstration project will take place in Milwaukee County, and build on an existing program that provides services later in the proceeding, at the adversarial stage. Services will be contracted out to a local organization to provide services to 200 non-custodial parents randomized to an experimental group and a control group. This project is expected to result in increased collections and improved relationships between custodial and non-custodial parents because the assistance earlier on in the process will help identify and diffuse potential problem situations before they become adversarial.