Illinois awarded for child support enforcement         

Record $2.8 million in delinquent payments collected in September

[NOV. 5, 2005]  WASHINGTON -- The Illinois Division of Child Support's acting administrator, Pam Compton, received the Commissioner's Award for Exemplary Business Re-engineering in Washington, D.C., on Oct. 25 from the federal Office of Child Support Enforcement. Meanwhile, the Illinois Department of Revenue also announced that it collected a record $2.8 million in delinquent child support in September alone.

"Under Governor Blagojevich's leadership, we have been able to increase child support collections and find new and creative ways to approach enforcement, including the New Hire initiative, online reporting and the ‘deadbeat parents' website," Compton said in accepting the award. "With over $1 billion in child support payments this year and over $2 million in delinquent payments last month, I know we're on the right track. I am proud to accept this award today, as it's been an honor to administer such a turn-around program for the state of Illinois."

Gov. Blagojevich has launched a number of innovative and aggressive programs to improve collection to help Illinois parents, including the New Hire initiative website, which allows employers to report new employees online more conveniently and quickly; the Deadbeat Parent website, identifying parents who owe more than $5,000 in child support payments, which has resulted in the collection of over $172,000 in back payments; federal certification of the Key Information Delivery System, the main computer for the child support process; and the Sheridan Rehabilitation Project, which helps ex-offenders access jobs and training in order to meet their child support obligations.

Just this month, as part of his continued efforts to increase child support collections in Illinois, Blagojevich announced that Illinois would join forces with the state of Iowa to increase enforcement of child support laws through the opening of a jointly staffed child support enforcement office in Rock Island.

In July, Blagojevich announced that a record-breaking $1 billion in child support payments have been made this year. The funds will provide 386,000 Illinois parents with the money they need to care for their children. More than $100 million of the $1 billion collected went to parents whose child support was severely overdue. Collections on cases receiving enforcement services from the Department of Healthcare and Family Services grew 8.5 percent, surpassing the national average of 3 percent growth.

"This truly has been a successful partnership between our two agencies," said Department of Revenue Director Brian Hamer. "The Department of Revenue's Child Support Section is able to use tough enforcement tools to capture delinquent child support payments referred to us by HFS, and our agents bring a wealth of collection experience to obtain payments, which has led to over $7 million in collections since July."

The Department of Revenue has nearly 30 people on staff devoted exclusively to collecting delinquent payments from noncustodial parents. A 1995 law gave the Department of Healthcare and Family Services the authority to refer certified child support cases to the Department of Revenue for collection. The Department of Revenue is now handling about 23,000 cases out of the over 100,000 managed by Healthcare and Family Services.

The Office of Child Support Enforcement award was given in recognition of the Illinois program's "business process re-engineering" and the performance improvements that resulted. The four areas that were mentioned in the nomination for the Commissioner's Award for Exemplary Business Re-engineering were:

1. The percentage of arrears cases with a collection on the arrears increased from about 48 percent in 2000 to over 58 percent in 2004. Illinois focused on special enforcement strategies, including multistate and in-state financial institutions and data matching.
2. The percentage of cases with orders where some child support was paid increased from 54 percent in 2000 to 63 percent in 2004. The state reviewed and improved automated data matching for employers. Beginning in 2005, it implemented an intensive statewide outreach to employers to improve reporting of new hires.
3. The percentage of children in the child support caseload with paternity resolved increased from 53 percent in 2000 to almost 67 percent in 2004. The division re-engineered its intake process to more quickly and efficiently process cases where the necessary information was present to locate the alleged father and establish parentage.
4. The percentage of cases with support orders established increased from just 30 percent in 2000 to 51 percent in 2004. The division re-engineered the entire field operations structure in Cook County to make extensive use of the administrative process.

Child support is the second-largest income source for low-income families who qualify for the program. In 2003, more than 846,735 children in Illinois were owed child support payments totaling about $3 billion, with a collection rate of 28 percent. Today, the collection rate is 32 percent, with 741,787 children's support being enforced by the Department of Healthcare and Family Services.

All child support enforcement services are free and include the automatic location of employers; automatic serving of income withholding notices; submission of child support debt to credit reporting agencies and to state and federal governments, which can then intercept tax refunds, suspend or revoke professional and occupational licenses, and deny passports. Information about applying is available at http://www.ilchildsupport.com/.

Pam Compton has been working in the Illinois Division of Child Support Enforcement program since 1991. She was named the assistant administrator in 2001 and has been acting administrator since December 2004. She has a bachelor's degree in management from the University of Illinois at Springfield and has completed course work for a master's degree in political studies, also from the University of Illinois at Springfield.

[Illinois Department of Healthcare and Family Services news release]

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