NASCIO Awards

AWARDS & RECOGNITION

2011 Awards: Improving State Operations

RECIPIENT:
Pennsylvania - PA Child Support Enforcement Data Exchanges

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The Pennsylvania Child Support Enforcement Program’s mission is to enhance the well-being of children by ensuring that they receive support, namely financial assistance and medical insurance, from their custodial and non-custodial parents. This is accomplished procedurally by locating parents, establishing paternity, establishing support obligations, and monitoring and enforcing those obligations. In order to achieve these goals, the child support enforcement program relies on information from multiple sources, including state and federal agencies, employers, financial institutions, insurance providers and licensing agencies. The Pennsylvania Child Support Enforcement System (PACSES) data exchanges facilitate the frequent and reliable receipt of government-to-business (G2B) information from various entities to improve both operations and outcomes.

Automated electronic data exchanges with employers, banks, insurance companies, licensing agencies and others contribute to the outstanding performance of Pennsylvania’s program. PACSES uses these exchanges to minimize manual data collection and validation, foster event-driven case management techniques and maximize predictive capabilities by providing a near real-time representation of parents’ financial, employment and asset history. In the last two years, the PACSES data exchanges have been enhanced to incrementally build upon “standard” child support interfaces utilized by many states. These continuous enhancements have helped take Pennsylvania to the next level of child support enforcement performance. The exchanges provide reliable, relevant and current data, allowing case managers to quickly determine the most effective actions for collecting child support or providing medical insurance to children.

Using automated electronic data exchanges through PACSES helped Pennsylvania to become in 2009 the first and only state to meet or exceed the 80 percent standard on all six federal performance measures for child support enforcement. Exceeding the 80 percent standard demonstrates the effectiveness of Pennsylvania’s child support enforcement services and also allows the commonwealth to obtain the maximum amount of federal incentives to support those services, approximately $30 million per year in additional funding to the state. Through these automated data exchanges, Pennsylvania collected approximately $1.04 billion during the 2010 calendar year, representing approximately two-thirds of the total $1.56 billion collected for the year.

Corporate Partner: Deloitte Consulting, LLP