We couldn’t determine how effective or timely the state’s child support services system is due to data limitations, but we saw several signs it’s not working as well as it could. Federal law requires states to assist parents in collecting monthly childcare payments. In Kansas, the Department for Children and Families is the primary state agency responsible for administering the state’s child support program. Kansas court trustees also can provide child support services, but they generally only provide enforcement services. A small number of parents we talked to expressed frustration and a lack of communication, regardless of whether they were served through DCF or court trustees. Kansas’s dual track child support system may create unequal costs for some Kansas parents. It also prevented us from evaluating the state’s child support system as a whole. DCF’s outdated computer system prevented us from determining how timely and effective its services are. We relied on 4 federal performance benchmarks as indicators of DCF’s child support performance. In recent years, DCF performed well on federal requirements to establish child support cases, but not on requirements to enforce those cases. DCF officials told us the difficult nature of their cases and certain administrative hurdles make it difficult to enforce child support payments. DCF and its contractors don’t have the tools to quickly identify and address delinquent payments. DCF’s use of federal performance measures to monitor contractors’ performance is too simplistic to identify poor performance.
Kansas’s low national rankings in child support enforcement may be due to the state’s unique system and outdated technology. Kansas’s child support services through DCF and its contractors performed worse on federal enforcement benchmarks than most other states. Kansas’s trustee option appears to be unique compared to other states, which may skew its national performance metrics. Kansas’s DCF child support services did not have key computer system features and collection tools that some other states had.
We couldn’t determine how effective or timely the state’s child support services system is due to data limitations, but we saw several signs it’s not working as well as it could. Federal law requires states to assist parents in collecting monthly childcare payments. In Kansas, the Department for Children and Families is the primary state agency responsible for administering the state’s child support program. Kansas court trustees also can provide child support services, but they generally only provide enforcement services. A small number of parents we talked to expressed frustration and a lack of communication, regardless of whether they were served through DCF or court trustees. Kansas’s dual track child support system may create unequal costs for some Kansas parents. It also prevented us from evaluating the state’s child support system as a whole. DCF’s outdated computer system prevented us from determining how timely and effective its services are. We relied on 4 federal performance benchmarks as indicators of DCF’s child support performance. In recent years, DCF performed well on federal requirements to establish child support cases, but not on requirements to enforce those cases. DCF officials told us the difficult nature of their cases and certain administrative hurdles make it difficult to enforce child support payments. DCF and its contractors don’t have the tools to quickly identify and address delinquent payments. DCF’s use of federal performance measures to monitor contractors’ performance is too simplistic to identify poor performance.
Kansas’s low national rankings in child support enforcement may be due to the state’s unique system and outdated technology. Kansas’s child support services through DCF and its contractors performed worse on federal enforcement benchmarks than most other states. Kansas’s trustee option appears to be unique compared to other states, which may skew its national performance metrics. Kansas’s DCF child support services did not have key computer system features and collection tools that some other states had.
Welcome to the Rundown, your source for the latest news and updates from the Kansas Legislative Division of Post Audit featuring LPA staff talking about recently released audit reports and discussing their main findings, key takeaways and why it matters. I'm Mori Exline. In April, 2023, legislative post audit released a performance audit that evaluated weather services to collect child support. Payments in Kansas are effective and timely. I'm with Amanda Schlumberger, senior auditor at Legislative Post Audit, who supervised the audit. Amanda, welcome to the rundown.
Speaker 2:Thank you for having me.
Speaker 1:So to get started, can you give me some background on what brought about this audit?
Speaker 2:So this audit came to us from the Senate Ways and Means committee. Um, and they and other legislators had concerns that the child support services, uh, systems in the state might not be effective or efficient in collecting child support payments. Uh, specifically they had concerns about DCF contractors, uh, and also the dual system Kansas has and how that affects performance, which I'll talk about more later on.
Speaker 1:Okay. So with that, so can you explain to me how the Child Support Services system is organized and how that process works? So like who are those main players and what are their responsibilities?
Speaker 2:Right. So as I said, the public child support system in Kansas has two different approaches or branches, however you wanna phrase it. Uh, the first is D C F, um, and they use two contractors, Maximus and Young Williams, uh, to provide establishment services. So that's things like, uh, finding a non-custodial parent, uh, creating the process for getting a case to have a child support payment court order, uh, those kinds of things. Um, and then also enforcement services, which are things like income withholding orders, um, asset seizures, uh, liens against property, those kind of things. And for D C F, under federal regulations, they are required to provide services for all, um, public assistance cases. So if an individual applies for say, TANF or snap and they get approved, um, they're then referred to child support services in d dc f as well if they have a child and a non-custodial parent. Um, and then additionally, uh, any custodial parent in Kansas can also apply for DCF services if they choose. You don't have to be on public assistance. It's just a voluntary, uh, use of DC f services as opposed to required. Um, so that's the first part of it. The second part of the public child support, uh, system in the state is, uh, a court trustee. Um, and this is in certain judicial districts. There's 17 of the 31 in Kansas that have court trustees. And these are essentially licensed attorneys who collect debts including child support payments. And they're in districts where the chief judge has decided to have a child or have a trustee and appoint one, um, state law allows for trustees but does not require them, which is why not every district has a trustee. And then finally, parents can also, uh, use private attorneys if they so choose. Um, but that's not part of the public system that's available to Kansas parents. Um, so we didn't look into that. I think it's important to note when talking about trustee services versus DCF services, et cetera, um, that services we found will vary by district, uh, because each trustee has different rules and such and tools that they use and follow. Um, and then also DCF services, as I mentioned earlier, provides things like establishment, uh, services, which trustees generally don't do a whole lot of. Um, and DCFS enforcement services, uh, are generally more robust in order to compel payments than the trustees have available to them.
Speaker 1:The report mentioned several concerns with the system, and it looks like those concerns fell into a few categories. Can you explain those concerns and those themes and what impact they may have?
Speaker 2:Yes. So we noted several concerns, uh, regarding the overall system. Um, the first of which was that some parents we spoke with expressed frustration at the lack of communication. Um, and that was regardless of if they used DCF or a court trustee. Um, so we spoke to a handful of parents who participated in child support services to understand what their experiences were. These responses are not projectable to the whole state, but they might indicate potential problems. Um, so the parents we spoke to were both, um, mothers fathers. They came from across judicial districts in Kansas and were comprised of different races and ethnicities as well. So several parents who use dcf, so six out of 11 that we spoke with, uh, were dissatisfied with their overall experience. Uh, and generally they mentioned things like needing additional communication or information about their case. Um, several told us about lost paperwork, um, which delayed action in their cases as well. And then also we noted these is issue issues as well with trustees. Um, so many of, or several of the parents. So six out of the 10 parents who used trustees that we spoke with, um, noted being dissatisfied with their communication. Um, several noted that they didn't even know they had a trustee. And this happens because in some judicial districts, the trustee automatically gets all of the non-required cases. So those were those public assistance cases that DCF under federal law has to handle. So some people are assigned to a trustee and don't even realize it. Um, and they were confused about who their trustee was, how to contact them, et cetera. Um, we did speak to some parents who were either neutral or satisfied with D C F services, um, and they noted being hopeful and having good communication with both D C F and trustees. Um, and they were just happy to have someone on their case essentially. So that was the sort of first area was parental concerns about how well the services are working for the people who need'em. Uh, the second area of concern we noted was this dual track system. Um, and specifically that it might create unequal costs for some Kansas parents. So, uh, parents who use DCF services either voluntarily like they apply to use their services or are required under, um, federal regulations with those public assistance programs, uh, don't get charged for services. DCFS child support program relies solely on state and federal funding. Um, about 70% of its funding is from federal funds and grants, and then 30% comes from the state social welfare fund. Parents using, uh, the court trustee system though are subject to a service fee. So trustees do not receive state or federal funding, and as such, their services are funded through a parent assessed fee. Um, under state law, that fee can only be three to 5% across judicial districts. Um, so hypothetically, um, if a child support payment was$200, parents would pay$6 a month in a district that has 3% fees and$10 a month in a district that had say 5% in fees. And then the other area that the dual track system, um, created some concern for us was simply in our ability to evaluate the state's child support system as a whole. Um, so the trustee system has no statutory requirement to collect, uh, consistent performance data. That's not saying individual trustees don't collect it, um, but there's no statewide requirement to report that or collect the same measurements and data across the system. Um, they also don't have to meet any sort of federal standards because they're not beholden to those same federal funding requirements. Um, and as such, we didn't have any aggregate performance data to evaluate, uh, trustee performance. And that in general prevented us also from comparing how trustees performed in relation to DC F and um, generally how that would affect effectiveness and timeliness in the state. And the sort of final area of concern we noted was issues related to DCFS effectiveness and timeliness, and specifically, um, how their computer system impacted our ability to be able to assess those measures. So D c F and its contractors use a nearly 25 year old computer system, um, and it is currently not able to meet business needs. Um, it requires extensive training and manual user input, and it takes time to run queries and such on this system. Um, the limitations of this system prevented us from analyzing data to determine, uh, timeliness and effectiveness at a case level, um, in appropriateness of actions taken on a case. Uh, DCF collects that data, but it's not housed in any way that is able to be extracted from the system beyond going into individual cases. DCF officials are aware of these limitations. They have a project underway. It's about 12 million, uh, dollar project that's moving the mainframe system they currently have to a modern cloud-based, uh, platform. And, uh, of note is that all payments in the state, whether it's with a trustee or dcf, go through the Kansas Payment Center. And we were able to evaluate the effectiveness of that system and we didn't find any issues with that system, uh, dispersing payments in a timely, in allowable manner.
Speaker 1:So the report mentions for federal benchmarks, those were paternity establishment support, order establishment, collection enforcement, and debt enforcement enforce. So can you explain to me how Kansas performed in these areas?
Speaker 2:These four measures are federal requirements. Um, they have two sort of thresholds that DC f and its contractors have to meet or have to try to meet. Uh, there's a minimum threshold which they need to meet to avoid, uh, penalties. And then there's a maximum threshold, which if a state reaches that, then they get sort of their maximum federal, uh, incentive payments. So we looked at paternity and support order to evaluate establishment services, and then we also looked at collection enforcement and debt enforcement to evaluate the enforcement, uh, services side of DCF child support services. This is very high level aggregate data that this is based on. So it's not like case level evaluating how a state is performing at doing appropriate actions in a case. Um, but this high level information is sort of an indicator of a state's performance in those two areas of establishment and enforcement. So we looked at, uh, the years 2017 through 2020, and we generally found that during that timeframe, Kansas and d f are performing well on the establishment measures. So that's paternity establishment and support order establishment. But on the enforcement measures, so collection enforcement and debt enforcement, uh, D C F is not performing as well. They did meet the minimum requirements, as I mentioned, that bottom threshold, but that still doesn't mean that the performance is doing as well as it could be. Cause for example, in fiscal year 2021 D DCF only collected about 57% of child support payments owed. So that's that, uh, collection enforcement federal re requirement. Um, and that means of the roughly 600 million in total child support payment owed that year in the state, only about, uh, 340 million of it was collected. Uh, so DCF officials told us there's sort of some, there's a couple reasons for why enforcement measures a leg behind, and one of those is that the nature of their cases tend to be more difficult. And then certain administrative hurdles also make it harder to enforce those, uh, payments. So DCF child support cases, um, by their nature with the, um, public assistance tend to be more low income families. And then some parents also actively try to avoid paying court ordered child support. Um, and because DC F has more extensive enforcement tools, they'll often get cases from trustees or elsewhere who are struggling to enforce, uh, a case with the tools they have. So by the nature, DC f is getting, um, potentially tougher cases to track down payments on. And then also DCF and its contractors are required to use court order approval, um, for most of their actions. So that means they can't just administratively decide that a case needs certain things done to try to compel payment. Um, many of their enforcement tools have to go through a court system and that can slow down payments and make it more difficult. Uh, we also noted that there's some issues related to dcfs, uh, support system and processes that can, um, contribute to their performance perhaps on some of these federal, uh, measures. So DCF and its contractors we found don't always have tools to quickly identify and address delinquent payments. That's not that they don't have tools. They have many, um, federal databases and such, like the new hire database that, um, will give them alerts. But because of the nature of their how old the system is, it's sometimes it doesn't give like an automatic alert when a case goes into non-payment or such. Instead, there's a report that has to be run. Those reports are run regularly, but it's harder to identify immediate, uh, actions that need to be taken. Additionally, uh, DCF uses these federal performance measures to monitor contractors' performance, and we found that to be a bit too simplistic for identifying poor contractor performance. There are some other measures that they have related to customer service and such. Um, additionally, uh, they do have monthly and quarterly meetings and such with contractors to discuss performance, but it's a much more informal process, and there's a reliance on reporting contractor performance on these federal measures. So we found that additional metrics could help identify performance issues and increased port payments. Um, DCF officials told us they are working on additional performance, um, metrics and processes for monitoring those contractors and their performance.
Speaker 1:So the report mentions that Kansas' system is different from other states. What makes Kansas' system unique and what is, what impact does that have?
Speaker 2:Right. So as mentioned, Kansas has the dual track system where in some judicial districts, custodial parents have the option of using a trustee if they're not required by federal regulations to uh, use DCF or they can opt into dcf. Um, and we found that no other state has this sort of dual track system. Uh, most states appear to have essentially their version of DCF overseeing all of their, uh, public child support systems available. So the result of that is that, uh, Kansas' performance on those federal benchmarks when compared to other states, again, it tends to be when it comes to establishment be sort of if you rank states in the middle, um, but on enforcement measures like collection and debt enforcement, it tends to be towards the bottom. As mentioned there is these rankings might be skewed a bit in terms of the cases that are portrayed in D dc F'S data. So since D C F is getting more difficult cases, and there's a portion of the state's public child support services with the trustees that isn't reflected in those federal data measurements, um, it may skew Kansas' performance lower when comparing to other states. Um, and part of this, uh, Kansas' performance, again, may be related to Kansas' computer system as well as that unique dual track system. Um, so we spoke with childs port officials in five other states to understand how their enforcement processes work. And of those, we, several states told us their computer system is able to automatically flag, uh, delinquent payments. Um, and those would be Colorado, Nebraska, and Oregon. And they told us that those automatic alerts then can help their staff provide enforcement services in a more timely manner. Montana officials told us their system has some but not fully automated capabilities. D DCF and its contractors cannot automatically flag late payments, um, in the same capacity. Again, they do have reports. So it's not that they're unaware, but it doesn't have that automatic aspect that other states have and can rely on. And sort of the final way that Kansas' system is a bit different than other states is that Kansas is a mostly judicial state. As I mentioned earlier. D C F has to go through the courts for a lot of their actions. Other states are more administrative states, meaning they are able to do more enforcement actions, um, without court intervention. Um, so that without that extra step of needing the court, those administrative states are able to take enforcement actions in a more, uh, automatic or quick manner.
Speaker 1:So finally, what was the biggest takeaway from this audit?
Speaker 2:Right, so I think the biggest takeaway here is that this is a very complex system with a lot of players involved, and that that complexity can influence how quickly cases are moved forward, how quickly payments are made, how quickly, uh, compelling payments happen once there is a late payment or a non-payment. Um, and that, uh, complexity makes it also harder to just see the big picture of what this looks like across the state and how performance is across the state on these services.
Speaker 1:Amanda Schlumberger is a senior auditor at legislative post audit. She supervised an audit that evaluated whether services to collect child support payments in Kansas are effective and timely. Amanda, thanks for visiting the rundown and discussing this audit's findings with
Speaker 2:Me. Thank you.
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