Contract expands child payment program
HHS awards contract to SRA International to expand system to track down child support payments
Federal Parent Locator Service
The Department of Health and Human Services has awarded an $18.9 million contract to SRA International Inc. to expand a program that uses data sharing to track down parents who are delinquent in paying child support payments.
SRA announced the award of the task order Dec. 9 under the Chief Information
Officer Solutions and Partners 2 innovations (CIO-SP2i) vehicle. It calls
for SRA to provide program management, information technology services and
support to HHS' Office of Child Support Enforcement.
Since 1996, SRA has provided services for the Federal Parent Locator
Service (FPLS), which collected $1 billion in delinquent child support payments
in 2001 alone.
Kathy Adams, SRA's director of health systems, said the program uses
information sharing among federal, state and local agencies to match delinquent
payers with Internal Revenue Service records and other government information.
"If you are due to get a tax refund and you have an outstanding judgment
against you for child support payments, that money is sent to the state
for the child's benefit," Adams said.
Subcontractors include TRW Inc., Millennium Solutions Inc. and Insight
Technology Solutions Inc.
As the federal government looks for ways to share data in creating the
new Homeland Security Department, the system is a good example of how it
could work, according to Renny DiPentima, president of SRA's consulting
and systems integration unit.
"The government has a number of examples where it has been able to successfully
share data across jurisdictions, sometimes interagency... this is a pretty
good example of sharing data from federal to state and most likely local
jurisdictions," he said.
The FPLS includes a National Directory of New Hires, which contains
quarterly wage forms submitted by all states to the Social Security Administration
and a Federal Case Registry, a collection of all the child support cases
within a state.
Names appearing on the wage reports are matched with location requests
sent to HHS by states. The names on the location requests are parents who
have failed to pay child support and whom states are tracking down with
the federal government's help.
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