Child Support Report XXVI, No. 8, 20040801

Child Support Report

Vol. XXVI, No. 8, Aug 2004

Child Support Report is a publication of the Office of Child Support Enforcement, Division of Consumer Services.

CSR is published for information purposes only. No official endorsement of any practice, publication, or individual by the Department of Health and Human Services or the Office of Child Support Enforcement is intended or should be inferred.

Dr. Heller Presents Program Management Advice: Take Three

Status Report on the Interstate Case Reconciliation Project

Studies Document Impact of National Directory of New Hires and Federal Case Registry

Excellent Customer Service Training Receives Recognition

Dr. Heller Presents Program Management Advice: Take Three

By: Elaine Blackman

Managers from Federal government agencies took it all in when OCSE Commissioner Sherri Z. Heller detailed three lessons she learned using the national child support program's performance management system. Dr. Heller spoke at the Excellence in Government conference in July in Washington, D.C.

Dr. Heller noted the success of increasing collections by 47 percent over the past five years and described the financial incentives system to states-with bonuses for those who exceed performance goals; penalties for those who fall behind.

The Commissioner's remarks captivated the audience, including Amelia Gruber, who posted a summary on the sponsor's web site, www.GovExec.com. In the online article, Ms. Gruber noted that the child support enforcement program is indeed a model of success, and earned the highest score among social service and block grant programs that were evaluated by the Office of Management and Budget last year using the Program Assessment Rating Tool.

Dr. Heller was one of three government administrators who spoke on "Linking Performance Results and Budget." Sponsored by Government Executive newsletter and the Council on Excellence in Government, the annual conference features dynamic speakers from government, business, academia, and the media, and is designed to motivate and inspire government leaders. It's touted as the only conference of its type designed by Federal managers for Federal managers.

Lessson one: Performance measures can have an impact for your organization, even if you don't control the workers where the work is getting done. Dr. Heller explained the voluntary paternity acknowledgement program, as an example.

Lesson two: Measures must be looked at as a group; they must balance each other. Concentrating on performing well on one measure, Dr. Heller explained, can reduce performance on another, and end up hurting your overall performance. If you establish a lot of orders through default judgments, for example, and end up with those parents accruing higher arrearages, you may score better in establishing orders, but your performance on measures that depend on collecting on those orders could go down.

Lesson three: Third party, objective evaluations can protect your budget and get you resources. As one example, Dr. Heller cited the HHS Office of the Inspector General report on the effectiveness of Access and Visitation grant programs. The study concluded that participation in mediation programs is associated with improved child support compliance. It demonstrated that improving access of noncustodial parents to their kids, in addition to being the right thing to do, also results in increased child support payment from these parents.

This finding led to a proposed increase in funding for the Access and Visitation program.

Elaine Blackman is a writer in the Division of Consumer Services

Status Report on the Interstate Case Reconciliation Project

By: Patricia Conrad

Automate, automate is the advice being provided to the fifty states and territories participating in OCSE's Interstate Case Reconciliation (ICR) project.

Working toward the goal of improved interstate communication, each state participating in the ICR sent an electronic file of its interstate cases to OCSE in late April. The state files were matched against each other, and results were returned to states. States are now reviewing the information they received and deciding how best to manage the task of reconciling discrepancies that were identified.

Improved communication begins with correct data being maintained on the computer systems of both states involved with each interstate case. Having the correct case IDs for other states is critical to the efficient flow of data between states.

The ICR provides correct "Other State Case IDs," enabling each state to upload this information to its computer system automatically. In many instances, the correction involves something as simple as adding or removing leading zeros to the other state's case ID. Because many of the corrections are this simple, OCSE is encouraging states to develop a program to automatically update the other state case IDs.

In addition to corrected Other State Case IDs, the ICR provides participating states with data to show when the interstate case is open in one state and closed in the other state, or when a corresponding interstate case could not be identified. The ICR also alerts states to situations in which participants in cases do not exist on the corresponding cases in other states.

To assist the states with the reconciliation task, OCSE has conducted a series of nationwide conference calls and developed an ICR User Guide. The User Guide suggests ways for states to set priorities for acting on the results of the ICR matching process, focusing their time, energy, and resources on reconciling the most important information first. The User Guide also provides examples of how each state's case ID is formatted, for the benefit of staff in other states who may need to record this information on their state systems manually.

In response to feedback obtained from states, based on their experiences working with their ICR results files, OCSE plans to conduct a second national ICR match this fall. States will concentrate on updating corrected case IDs and checking on variances in state files identified through the first match. OCSE will share "best practices" as state systems are updated with corrected information.

Increased accuracy of case data will result in improved interstate communication, leading to improved services to those families requiring child support services from multiple states. The ICR is an example of collaborative efforts being undertaken between the states and OCSE toward ensuring this goal.

Darrin Jones, Oregon Division of Child Support User Analyst, commented on the ICR Project. "Overall, I cannot express how the ICR team has assisted me both with this project, and professionally within my career. My job as a user analyst is to be a power user of the Child Support Enforcement Automated System to the benefit of our mainframe programmers and our line staff. By participating in the ICR and the associated calls, I have been able to make contacts in other states that I would never have made, have learned to have confidence in my understanding of how my own system works, and to not be afraid to bring forth issues that have occurred in our system."

Patricia Conrad is the ICR Project Manager, OCSE

Studies Document Impact of National Directory of New Hires and Federal Case Registry

By: Jeff Crook

Since the implementation of the National Directory of New Hires (NDNH) in 1997 and the Federal Case Registry (FCR) in 1998, OCSE's Division of Federal Systems (DFS) has conducted studies to assess the effectiveness of these tools and calculate the amount of child support collections attributable to their use. These studies have been conducted in a variety of ways-onsite in states and via remote access by DFS staff, and by the states themselves using A Guidebook For A Common Methodology For Determining NDNH-Attributable Child Support Collections. The studies involve drawing a sample of NDNH-to-FCR noncustodial parent (NCP) matches returned to states during a recent fiscal year and reviewing the related child support cases to track what actions were taken using the data.

Thus far, eleven states have been studied and the results show that more than one third of the NDNH proactive matches, or 35 percent, resulted in direct income-withholding orders (IWOs) being issued, and approximately 13 percent of the samples studied resulted in a collection directly attributable to the NDNH-to-FCR match (the NDNH "hit" rate). There are many reasons why IWOs are not sent or why no collections result, such as having no support order for the NCP, the case being closed, or the fact that payments are already being made. While individual state results vary depending on their size and other factors, the studies have gleaned information that applies to all states.

The NDNH is Effective

Even for "Temp" Agencies The NDNH clearly provides timely employer data, as evidenced by the collections successfully made from temporary employment (temp) agencies. Given the transitory nature of temp agency employment, they can often be the hardest type of employers from which to collect child support. By separating the sample into temp agencies and non-temp agencies and comparing the results for each group, we can compare the collection results between temp agencies and other employers. The results show that the difference is not as great as one might expect - the overall hit rate for temp agencies was 11.7 percent, compared to a hit rate for non-temp agencies of 13.4 percent. This demonstrates that even where temp agencies are concerned, the NDNH is effective at locating NCPs and providing employment information to states before the NCP changes jobs again. Overall, approximately 16 percent of the sample matches were for temporary agencies.

Timely Processing Doubles Success

The NDNH studies have provided quantitative evidence that the more recent the employment data, the more likely it is to result in a collection. Although there are many variables that affect whether an NDNH match will result in child support collections, comparative results for the same state from two different fiscal years underscore the importance of processing incoming NDNH matches in a timely manner. The states that were studied for two fiscal years achieved significant improvement from one year to the next in the effective and timely use of the NDNH matches, more than doubling their hit rate from 7.5 percent to 15.4 percent. The main difference between the two fiscal years was, for six months during the first year, matches returned by the NDNH did not post when they were sent. Those matches were held by the system and released later in the year, while most of the second year matches were posted normally. Significant delays in processing data and issuing wage withholdings increase the chance that an obligor will have changed jobs by the time the IWO is received by the NDNH employer, and ultimately decrease the resulting collections. In this case, matches that posted normally were 2.66 times more likely to result in a collection than matches that were delayed.

These are just some of the observations from the studies, which OCSE plans to continue with expectations of finding more evidence that the NDNH and FCR are having positive impact on families and children.

Jeff Crook is a Senior Analyst in the Federal Parent Locator Service

Excellent Customer Service Training Receives Recognition

By: Rachel Mitchell

How many rings does it take to reach the heart of State Office Child Support Enforcement? (No more than three!) Have you ever been accused of "under-promising" and "over-delivering?" Do you have a mirror on your desk? If you do not know the relevance of these questions it might be time for you to review and renew your customer service skills.

Five members of the Community Collaboration Unit (CCU) invested two days to do just that. Thanks to the Federal Office of Child Support Enforcement, the CCU staff along with many co-workers were invited to participate in a two-day course designed to reinforce and refresh the concept of excellent customer service.

Susan Greenblatt and Charlene Butler, both of the Washington D.C. office of OCSE, were the trainers for this event offered June 21-22 and June 23-25 in the Oklahoma State Office CSE.

During the training, members of the CCU along with many of the front-line field staff recognized the value of educating our customers on their rights and responsibilities and the services CSE provides. Our customers often do not understand we do not represent either the custodial or the non-custodial parent. The group concluded that, if CSE spent more time educating our customers up front, staff would spend less time processing unnecessary applications, returning redundant phone calls and explaining routine procedures.

Hopefully sometime in the near future, plans can be made to explore the need for a standardized, mandatory orientation session for all new IV-D customers. In the meantime make sure you ask the CCU if they have been under-promising and over-delivering!

This article is reprinted with permission from the Oklahoma State Office Newsletter

Child Support Report is a publication of the Office of Child Support Enforcement, Division of Consumer Services.

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