When I joined OCSS as commissioner in 2021, I was honored to continue my lifelong work of emphasizing engagement and leading through my 3Ps: People, Process, and Performance. Well, three years have flown by, and it’s amazing how much we’ve been able to accomplish together! While I can’t note every success, I do want to highlight some significant child support accomplishments during the Biden-Harris Administration.
Name Change and Whole Family Strategies
In 2023, we changed the name of the Office of Child Support Enforcement to Office of Child Support Services, reflecting our program’s commitment to serve and support the whole family. This change emphasizes the national program’s evolution, innovation, modernization, and recognition of the needs of today’s families. OCSS also developed an action plan for advancing inclusive, whole family strategies in child support services. Our process for developing the plan was presented to ACF senior staff as a model to replicate in other program offices.
Rules and Regulations
We supported ACF’s robust regulatory agenda by publishing federal rules that provide a framework under which state and tribal child support programs operate. Here are some significant rules from this term that help programs and the families they serve:
- Removing burdens to support the growth of tribal child support programs: ACF published a rule that supports the growth of the tribal child support program by eliminating burdensome costs. As of Oct. 1, 2024, the federal government fully funds new and existing tribal child support programs. This rule supports tribes and tribal organizations that wish to operate a child support program consistent with their history, values, and cultures.
- Helping child support agencies get through emergencies: ACF published a rule to provide targeted and time-limited relief to states from certain child support program performance penalties when natural disasters and other calamities impact operations and prevent a state from achieving its required performance measures. This helps programs continue to support the very families most in need of public assistance during a crisis.
- Connecting noncustodial parents to employment resources: ACF published a rule that gives child support programs flexibility to use federal funding to provide employment and training services such as skills assessments, occupational training, job placement, and work supports, including transportation assistance. This would help parents who have difficulty paying child support, while also improving the likelihood of collecting payments that promote family and child well-being.
Grants
During the Biden-Harris Administration, we offered grant opportunities to state and tribal child support programs for research and child support program improvements:
- Support domestic violence survivors: The Safe Access for Victims’ Economic Security demonstration creates practical, replicable process and program improvements to ensure survivors receive the financial support they’re due and reduce the likelihood that perpetrators can use the child support system to continue their abuse.
- Promote equity: The Advancing Equity in Child Support demonstration aims to assess inequities within the child support program and address disproportional access to services.
- Help parents find jobs: The Next Generation Child Support Employment Services demonstration expands and enhances child support-led employment services for noncustodial parents to help them get jobs and increase reliable payments for their children.
International Efforts
We work with states and countries to help families seeking support when parents live in different countries. Here are some big accomplishments we made this term for international families:
- Making international payments more efficient: We launched the Central Authority Payment (CAP) service that sends international child support payments from states to foreign authorities through a centralized process. It streamlines international payments, reduces costs, and ensures families receive more money. As of Nov. 2024, CAP sent over $5 million in outgoing international payments from 44 states to five countries. We’re working to expand CAP enrollment to other countries and accept incoming payments. A big thank you to the HHS Program Support Center and the Department of Treasury’s International Treasury Services for helping us get payments to our foreign partners, and to Georgia, Michigan, Florida, Hawaii, Washington, and New Jersey for their help piloting payments to other countries.
- Translating international forms for programs: We launched iForms, a new Portal application that can help state child support programs save time, money, and effort by generating Hague Child Support Convention forms in multiple languages to send to foreign partners. This promotes child well-being around the world.
Fatherhood
In support of ACF’s commitment to helping fathers, we published Services for Fathers and Families (in English and Spanish), a handout that connects fathers and their families to help with child support, employment, housing, health insurance, and more. The project was a collaboration with the Office of Family Assistance and the Office of Administration that also produced a handout for fathers with information on parenting tips (PDF) to help fathers be the best they can be. These handouts were the first in a series of similar materials from ACF program offices.
Policy Documents
We provide guidance and training to help states and tribes develop and operate their individual programs according to federal laws and regulations. Here are a couple of major policy documents we issued this term:
- Supporting family reunification: OCSS wrote a joint letter with the Children’s Bureau that highlighted new guidance about removing financial barriers to help reunify families in the child welfare program. The Children’s Bureau policy notes IV-E programs must thoroughly review cases and be confident that a referral to the child support program will not interfere with reunification.
- Encouraging debt relief to help parents meet child support obligations: We published an Information Memorandum that gave agencies information about the benefits of compromising child support debt and encouraging them to consider debt compromise programs as ways to best serve customers.
- Sharing best practices for system modernization: We collaborated with the ACF Office of the Chief Technology Officer and issued system modernization guidance to minimize risk of challenges, ensure compliance with federal requirements, and encourage technology that enables the child support community to effectively support responsible parenting, family self-sufficiency, and child well-being.
- Encouraging close examination of SNAP referrals to support families: We worked closely with the Food and Nutrition Service (FNS) on updating their policy guidance for states around mandatory SNAP referrals to the child support program. FNS encouraged states to evaluate the impacts on vulnerable individuals’ access to nutrition assistance, especially children, and determine if these referrals best meet the needs of participants. It cited a recent FNS study that showed little evidence that implementing referrals to child support increased child support cooperation or improved family outcomes.
I want to thank our child support professionals and partners nationwide who have collaborated with us to accomplish these important changes. I’m so proud of what we’ve accomplished this term. My chapter at ACF ends Jan. 20, but I know you’ll continue to move the program forward. Wishing you all the best in 2025!
Tanguler Gray, Commissioner
This blog gives the commissioner a forum to communicate directly with child support professionals and other partners about relevant topics. The Commissioner’s Voice is reprinted from the December 2024 Child Support Report newsletter.