Publications - Core Program Services

In 2012, the Federal Office of Child Support Enforcement made “Parenting Time Opportunities for Children” (PTOC) grant awards to five states. The grants were intended to: …improve the financial and emotional support of children in the child support system by increasing safe opportunities for them to build relationships with both parents. The parenting time grants Read More

Federal regulations require each state to establish one set of child support guidelines that courts and hearing officers should apply as a rebuttal presumption in any judicial or administrative proceeding for the award of child support. Statewide guidelines encourage consistency in child support award amounts among similarly situated parties and provide predictable amounts to parents. Read More

With nearly 40 percent (39.7%) of all births occurring to unwed parents, and unmarried parents making up over half of the child support caseload nationally (Pontisso, 2009), it is more important than ever for child support agencies to reach unmarried parents around the time of the birth of their babies to communicate important messages about Read More

The child support and child welfare project was undertaken to improve collaboration between sister agencies in multiple jurisdictions. The Center for Policy Research of Denver, Colo., with grant funding from the Federal Office of Child Support Enforcement, conducted two meetings in Washington, D.C., in 2006 and 2007 to bring together top-level managers and other key representatives of child welfare and child support Read More

Since 1989, federal regulations require each state to provide presumptive guidelines (formulas) for determining the amount of child support awards and to review their guidelines at least once  every four years. Most states developed and adopted their initial guidelines in the late 1980s. States developed their guidelines based on similar premises and guidelines models and relied on a limited number Read More

Colorado has an opportunity to increase the monthly incomes of Colorado Works families as well as improve their paths to self-sufficiency by changing the State’s child support pass-through and disregard policies. Families eligible for Colorado Works, which is Colorado’s Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program, have below-poverty incomes. When a family applies for Colorado Works, any payment toward the monthly Read More

The “Family Centered Services for Unwed Parents in the IV‐D Caseload” grant (90FD0141) was awarded to the Child Support Enforcement Division of the Massachusetts Department of Revenue (DOR) on September 30, 2009. The goal of the project, which was known locally as the Parent Support Program of Hampden County (PSP), was to develop, implement, and evaluate a program Read More

This Office of Child Support Enforcement Special Improvement Project was undertaken to examine the features of effective debt compromise programs and to generate empirical information on the outcomes they produce. To identify best practices, the Center for Policy Research (CPR) convened a two-day conference in June 2009 with representatives of eight states that have experience initiating and operating Read More

President Obama’s 2013 budget proposal requiring child support agencies to establish parenting time in all new child support orders is the most recent development in a nearly 25-year exploration of parenting time issues that the federal Office of Child Support Enforcement (OCSE) has pursued. This has included the OCSE Access and Visitation Demonstration Projects, begun in 1988, which experimented Read More

In 2009, the Massachusetts Department of Revenue, Division of Child Support Enforcement (DOR) applied for and received a Section 1115 demonstration and evaluation grant from the Federal Office of Child Support Enforcement (OCSE). The application was submitted in response to an OCSE initiative aimed at improving the ability of state child support enforcement programs to proactively address the effect Read More