Employer Database Best Practices

These best practices were obtained from states during a multi-state conference call conducted by the Federal Office of Child Support Enforcement (OCSE) that specifically addressed issues related to maintaining an employer database. Most states maintain an employer database in their statewide-automated child support enforcement systems. States relayed that when creating their employer databases, they considered the following key areas: data integrity, data duplication, database keys, controlling access, and third-party service providers.

Data Integrity

• States use commercial off-the-shelf software to clean up and format addresses before storing addresses in their databases or attempting to match incoming addresses with existing system addresses.
• States perform periodic database clean-up to eliminate duplicate employer records.
• Some states went through an initial process when creating their employer database to remove unnecessary records and standardize employer names and addresses.

Data Duplication

• States employ matching routines to prevent automatic duplication of employer records. For instance, states may first match on the State Employer Identification Number (SEIN) and then the Federal Employer Identification Number (FEIN) to avoid duplicating employers on the database.
• Some states attempt to find the employer on their system by either matching on the FEIN and address or a standardized employer name and address. If they are unable to find a match with either of these criteria, they attempt the match based on a standardized address alone. If they find a match on the address alone, they determine if the address is for a payroll provider or an unemployment insurance (UI) claims provider rather than an employer address. If no match is found, they add the employer to their employer table and tie the employer information to the person.
• States use routines to strip out special characters such as dashes, periods, ampersands and number symbols. Others also strip out unnecessary words such as "and", "Inc.", "Corp.", and "the".

Database Keys

• Several states have systems that generate a unique identification number for each employer record in their employer database. States use this unique identification number as the key to the record, so they may store multiple employers for one FEIN or SEIN.

Controlling Access

• States restrict access to the employer database to a designated number of workers. These workers update the information, using forms received from line staff, and research automated entries with limited or incorrect information. They also have a quality control process in place to make sure that manual entries are complete and accurate.

Third-Party Service Providers

• States use the Employer Addresses for Income-Withholding Purposes CD, created by OCSE, to help determine the correct address for employers whose wage records are reported via a UI claims provider. This CD provides information obtained from the UI claims providers' own databases, which contain their clients' FEINs, names, and addresses. Using this CD, a state can modify its programs to retrieve the information from the CD. By loading the information to a table and searching the table for the FEIN, the state system can replace the UI Claims Provider address with the correct employer's address. The CD contains the information in several formats to accommodate various ways states may want to use the data. The file names and record formats are included with the CD in order to determine the format that works best for a particular situation.