Child Support Enforcement: Reorienting Management Toward Achieving Better Program Results

To strengthen the linkage between its roles and responsibilities and strategic plan, OCSE established an initiative to focus its program priorities on the eight states with the largest child support caseloads. To implement this initiative, OCSE is working with officials from the Administration for Children and Families, regional offices, and state child support enforcement programs to focus their collective efforts on achieving national program goals and implementing new requirements established by the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996. OCSE is also working to establish performance baselines that will enable it to track increases in child support collections related to use of the newly implemented new hire and case registry databases. OCSE, in conjunction with the states, still needs to specify the results it anticipates from this and other initiatives and measures it will use to assess its own performance.

The 1996 welfare reform legislation requires that states review and report annually on their compliance with federal program requirements. As a result, instead of conducting compliance audits, OCSE will, in accordance with the new legislation, review the states' compliance reports and provide them with comments, recommendations for corrective actions, and technical assistance, when appropriate. OCSE expects to provide technical assistance to the states based on its assessment of state program operations and performance. In this way, in keeping with the recommendation, OCSE will be determining why states have not met performance targets and providing technical assistance to help them improve their performance.

The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996, when fully implemented, will establish a new incentive funding structure. It requires the Secretary of HHS, in consultation with the states, to develop a new incentive funding structure that provides payments to states based on performance. The act required the Secretary to report details of the new system to Congress by March 1, 1997. HHS formed an Incentive Funding Work Group that developed recommendations for a new incentive funding structure. The new structure, as proposed to the Congress in February 1997, would measure state performance in five areas: establishment of paternities, establishment of child support orders, collections of current child support due, collections of past due child support, and cost effectiveness. The revised incentive funding structure broadens the basis for awarding payments and recognizes state performance across all three major program goals established in the strategic plan.