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State honors top performing county child support agencies for 2012; Lake among those that increased collections
The California Department of Child Support Services recognized California’s top performing local child support agencies for federal fiscal year 2012 at its statewide directors meeting last week.
“We are proud of the hard work that all our counties perform daily,” said Department of Child Support Services Interim Director Kathleen Hrepich. “Once each year, we recognize those counties that have exceeded the annual goals set for performance in the child support program. These top performers are to be especially commended, given the difficult economic conditions in which all child support professionals operate. Higher performance means more real dollars for California’s families and children.”
Hrepich presented awards for local child support agencies with the top overall performance, by caseload size, most improved performance on five federal performance measures, and dollars distributed.
The department also presented awards to 11 local agencies that increased their distributed collections by more than 3 percent over the previous year.
Those agencies included Lake, Marin, El Dorado, Kern, Imperial, Yuba, Colusa, Riverside, San Bernardino, Santa Barbara, Butte and Contra Costa.
Lake, which the California Department of Child Support Services classifies as a “very small” county, had collections of $4.4 million with a 58.2 percent collection rate on current support, putting it among the lowest in terms of its collection rate percentage, according to a preliminary report on federal fiscal year 2012.
The special “Director’s Excellence Award” was presented to two counties: Marin and San Bernardino. For this award, the recipients not only had to exceed all five federal performance measures, but they also had to increase their total distributed collections by 3 percent or more over the previous year.
Five counties were honored for top overall performance by caseload size. They ranked highest among their caseload size in all federal performance measures: San Diego (very large county), Ventura (large), Sonoma (medium), San Luis Obispo (small) and Marin (very small).
Five child support agencies showed the most improvement in overall performance, by caseload size: San Diego (very large county), Stanislaus (large), Sonoma (medium), Napa (small) and Marin (very small).
The “Top 10 Award” for those that performed best out of all 51 agencies on overall performance are listed by ranking as follows: 1. Marin, 2. San Luis Obispo, 3. Plumas, 4. Sierra/Nevada, 5. El Dorado, 6. Sonoma, 7. Ventura, 8. Central Sierra (Amador/Alpine/Calaveras/Tuolumne), 8. Lassen and 10. Napa. Two agencies were tied for eighth.
Combined, the “Top 10” local child support agencies manage 4.9 percent of the state’s total caseload and distributed 6.7 percent of the state’s total distributed collections. They distributed $155,578,314 in child support during this past federal fiscal year.
The county chosen for having the greatest percentage increase over the prior year in distributed collections was Marin, which showed a 9.4 percent increase from federal fiscal year 2011 to federal fiscal year 2012.
The California Department of Child Support Services and the 51 local child support agencies operate the largest child support system in the nation with approximately 1.3 million cases.
In federal fiscal year 2012, which runs from October through September, California’s child support program collected and distributed more than $2.3 billion in child support payments.