THE MISSISSIPPI LEGISLATURE

The PEER Committee reviewed the Mississippi Department of Human Services’ Division of Child Support Enforcement, focusing its review on whether the division:

• allocates personnel based on caseload demands;


• follows laws, rules, and regulations governing the suspension of professional, driver’s, and sporting licenses for noncustodial parents who are delinquent in child support payments;


• follows laws, rules, and regulations governing operations of the division’s Central Receipting and Disbursement Unit (which is responsible for receiving and disbursing child support payments); and,


• receives the maximum in performance incentive payments available to states for support of their child support enforcement efforts from the federal Department of Health and Human Services and uses all available tools for improving performance of the division in collecting and disbursing child support payments.

The stated purpose of the child support enforcement program is to promote family self-sufficiency and child well-being by:

• locating noncustodial parents and establishing paternity when necessary;


• working with the courts to establish orders for child support; and,


• collecting and distributing child support payments.

Mississippi’s Division of Child Support Enforcement receives the majority of its funding from the federal government. The federal Department of Health and Human Services reimburses states approximately 66 percent of allowable annual expenditures for child support enforcement services--i.e., parent locator, paternity, and child support enforcement support services. The federal government also provides the states with incentive funds, receipt of which is based on each state’s success in achieving federally prescribed program outcomes. Other sources of program funds include state general funds, fees, and a retained portion of child support collections for families that receive Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF).

As of July 1, 2003, the Division of Child Support Enforcement had 480 employees who were responsible for managing 335,598 child support cases.

The division’s staff is organized into three levels of offices:

• the Program Office, located in Jackson, which is responsible for administering and monitoring the state’s child support enforcement program;


• nine regional offices, which are responsible for supervising the implementation and operation of the child support program and for providing technical supervision to the county offices; and,


• eighty-four county child support enforcement offices (Bolivar and Chickasaw counties each have two county offices), which are responsible for the daily management of child support cases.

The report addresses the objectives in question-answer format.

State law requires that the Division of Child Support Enforcement suspend licenses of noncustodial parents who are delinquent in child support payments unless arrears are paid in full or the noncustodial parent has signed a stipulated agreement to pay the arrears. However, the division has allowed some noncustodial parents who have not met this condition to avoid suspension.

Although state law requires all licensing entities to provide license data to the Division of Child Support Enforcement, the division has collected such data from only about half of the state licensing entities. This could potentially allow delinquent noncustodial parents with certain types of licenses to avoid license suspension and reduces the division’s effectiveness in helping custodial parents and their children collect the child support payments owed to them.

Also, the Division of Child Support Enforcement’s Program Office does not formally and routinely monitor license suspension actions in the county offices to determine compliance with policy and the extent to which license suspensions result in payment of delinquent child support obligations.

The division’s official policy is to suspend check writing privileges after one insufficient funds check. After receiving a returned check, the CRDU mails a Notice of Non-Sufficient Funds to the noncustodial parent or employer asking for full remittance of the bad check within fifteen days, plus a service charge. PEER found no evidence of follow-up beyond mailing of this notice. Although the division’s policy manual states that district attorneys are authorized to assist with recovery of returned checks, the CRDU rarely, if ever, uses district attorneys to collect funds. The division lost $34,645 in child support collections in FY 2003 due to its failure to recover payments made with bad checks.

CRDU staff do not follow a federal regulation requiring segregation of duties in cash handling, which reduces assurance that funds received as child support payments will not be misappropriated. Also, CRDU staff do not stamp the date received on child support payment checks; therefore, they cannot monitor whether they are following another federal regulation for timely distribution of child support payments.

The U. S. Department of Human Services grants states incentive payments each year as a portion of a fixed amount of federal incentive funds available. The department bases each state’s incentive payments on the total amount of child support collections and its scores on five performance measures in relation to those of other states. Federal incentive payments are an important source of funding for Mississippi’s child support enforcement program (7% of total funding for Mississippi’s program in FY 2003). In federal fiscal years 2000 and 2001, Mississippi received $1,914,202 and $2,479,599, respectively, in federal incentive payments and received an estimated $2,600,000 and $2,800,000 for federal fiscal years 2002 and 2003.

While the 2002 performance data used to calculate incentives and assess penalties is still preliminary (it has not been finalized by the Office of Child Support Enforcement after federal data reliability audits), according to federal code, the lack of significant improvement in Mississippi’s paternity establishment score (one of the five performance areas) between 2001 and 2002 meets the criteria for a possible 1% to 2% TANF block grant funds penalty.

The federal government also provides opportunities for child support agencies to obtain extra funding through competition for grants for special improvement projects. Mississippi’s Division of Child Support Enforcement has not received any federal special improvement project funds and has only applied for these funds twice in the last five years.

Concerning performance monitoring, the guidance provided by the division’s policy and procedure manual only relates to the self-assessment and does not address other performance initiatives. The Division of Child Support Enforcement’s Program Office staff develops state performance targets without a formal methodology and the targets are not provided in a meaningful context.

The division has no uniform content or uniform reporting of performance throughout regions. Division program office staff do not routinely provide feedback and program results on all performance measures to all levels of operations in order to motivate improved performance. Also, the division does not systematically monitor the performance of the Central Receipting and Disbursement Unit.

1. The Division of Child Support Enforcement should perform a thorough analysis of county and regional staffing levels regularly and redistribute existing staff according to caseload demands. The analysis should include distribution of child support enforcement officers, supervisors, attorneys, and clerical staff.


2. The Division of Child Support Enforcement should develop policies and procedures for working with all licensing entities that are not electronically connected to the department’s database. If data cannot immediately be electronically connected, the Division of Child Support Enforcement should develop other procedures for collecting license information and protocol to suspend licenses from those entities.


3. The Division of Child Support Enforcement should change the METSS procedures to comply with state law requiring license suspension when a noncustodial parent is delinquent with child support payments unless the noncustodial parent pays the full amount of the arrears or signs an agreement to pay the arrears within the ninety-day notice period given to the noncustodial parent. The establishment of an income withholding order within the noncustodial parent’s notice period that does not increase the payment of arrears should not exempt a noncustodial parent from license suspension. The Division of Child Support Enforcement should change the METSS system to send an alert notice to the child support enforcement officer at the end of the notice period informing the officer to review the case for license suspension even if an income withholding order was activated within the notice period.


4. The Division of Child Support Enforcement should change the METSS system so that alerts to child support enforcement officers at the end of the ninety-day notice period cannot be deleted until action has been taken on the case. Because supervisors can obtain a record of these alerts, changing the alerts would allow supervisors to monitor more easily whether the child support enforcement officers have taken action on the cases that have outstanding alerts regarding license suspension and whether the actions taken comply with policy.


5. The Division of Child Support Enforcement should develop procedures to monitor the effectiveness of license suspension as an enforcement tool. The Division of Child Support Enforcement should develop procedures to collect data regularly on the number and types of licenses suspended and reinstated. Instead of only collecting data on lump sums of arrears payments collected due to license suspension, the Division of Child Support Enforcement should also collect data on increased monthly arrears payments due to license suspension.


6. The Division of Child Support Enforcement should create a monitoring system for tracking the period between arrival and distribution of child support checks that includes stamping dates on checks upon arrival. The Central Receipting and Disbursement Unit’s staff should stamp each check with the date received at the same time that it is stamped with the endorsement.


7. The Division of Child Support Enforcement should change cash handling procedures to comply with segregation of duties requirements. The Division of Child Support Enforcement should create a procedure that ensures that the person who accepts cash payments does not also post the payments in the computer system.


8. The Division of Child Support Enforcement should revise its policy and procedure manual to include specific instructions regarding the referral of employers who send returned checks to the CRDU to the district attorney’s Bad Check Unit if the division’s collection attempt is unsuccessful.


9. The Division of Child Support Enforcement should create a unified performance monitoring plan that encompasses performance measures, data collection, and reporting responsibilities for state, regional, and county office staff. This plan should include incentive performance measures. The Division of Child Support Enforcement should include the plan in the policies and procedures manual.


10. The Division of Child Support Enforcement should improve communication of performance measures and results to county staff, including child support enforcement officers, by providing county, regional, and statewide results on all federal incentive, self-assessment, and state performance measures at least on a quarterly basis. The Division of Child Support Enforcement should communicate performance results through written reports provided to all staff, as well as through discussion at county-level staff meetings.


11. The Division of Child Support Enforcement should report state performance targets as percentages instead of raw numbers to make them more meaningful. For instance, instead of measuring the dollars collected in current support, measure the support dollars collected as a percentage of the support dollars owed. The target, then, would be a percentage of collections owed, instead of a dollar amount that lacks context.


12. The Division of Child Support Enforcement should create a methodology for setting the amount of the yearly state target (e.g., creating a standard to increase targets perpetually by a certain percentage over the previous year).


13. The Division of Child Support Enforcement should create special improvement project ideas, eliciting input from state office, regional, and county staff and submit applications for federal Office of Child Support Enforcement Special Improvement Project funding yearly as it is available.