Program Description

Program/Practice Description: Fulton County Department of Family and Children Services leverages data and resources through both the SUCCESS and STARS systems for several important purposes: to more accurately calculate child support payments in relation to TANF dispensation, and to reflect work participation rates to increase the amount of money available to the county through Federal funding. Data from these two systems also enables the staff to conduct appropriate planning sessions and improve the performance of case managers.

Innovations and Results: Through a key partnership with Child Protective Services (CPS) and the initiative of technically capable staff, Fulton County is able to run more informative reports by using the two systems. First, the State of Georgia developed SUCCESS (System for the Uniform Calculation and Consolidation of Economic Support Services), an integrated computer system that records information and generates benefits to assistance units. SUCCESS is an eligibility system that runs calculations to determine if a person is eligible for TANF, Food Stamps, and/or Medicaid assistance. By interfacing with Social Security and unemployment benefit data, then passing the information to the Electronic Benefit Transfer system, SUCCESS verifies an applicant's financial information so TANF and Food Stamps benefits can be issued. Through arrangements with CPS, Fulton County is able to connect to relevant information in STARS (Support, Tracking, Accounting and Reporting System), which verifies child support payments. This process enables those child support payments to be passed through to the mother, both benefiting the TANF customer family and decreasing Fulton County TANF costs. In addition to this development, a member of the Quality Assurance (QA) team runs reports through the SUCCESS system that enables Fulton County to more appropriately track work participation rates and conduct data-driven decision-making.

Operations: All Fulton County caseworkers use the SUCCESS and STARS systems to gather and record information pertaining to their TANF customers. In addition, the QA team supports the Employment Services teams by providing staff with additional information extracted from the systems. By using the SUCCESS system in conjunction with Excel and Access, several reports are run easily by Employment Services managers to gain a real-time view of monthly work participation rates. Reports typically are run beginning about 10 days before the State’s keying deadlines in order to provide staff with data to make adjustments to their activities and find missing hours. While no hard evidence supports this practice, administrators report that SUCCESS and STARS facilitate increased efficiency in their investigation of eligibility, and the additional reports help the Employment Services teams meet their requirements. At the end of each month, the Fulton County office also holds G-Force meetings, at which the QA team shares the prior month’s performance, color coded so teams instantly know whether they are meeting, exceeding, or failing expectations in any area.

Funding: While the additional work of the QA staff member who extracts data from SUCCESS and enables the Employment Services team to run custom reports does not receive extra funding, the Fulton Office reports that QA is, on the whole, very cost-effective. By effectively using systems and processes to report on the agency’s performance, Fulton County is able to substantially increase its compliance with a court order.

Staffing: The Fulton County QA Section has 42 employees organized into two teams. About 30 staff are responsible for fraud prevention and program accuracy. The others are QA specialists who are charged with the critical responsibility of program monitoring and reporting. Their supervisor is tasked with sharing information at State and county meetings, directing the work of the team members, and creating reports for the Employment Services team. He explains that an office cannot simply train someone to design and manage systems that produce the reports used by the Employment Services team, but must find someone who first understands the eligibility program, can learn to use the data-gathering tools, and is able to blend these two skills. The two qualities needed are logic, an intuitive understanding of the desirable outcomes, and programming knowledge (Visual Basic, Access, Excel).

Training: Fulton County staff also participate in specialized State training to learn about SUCCESS and STARS operations. In a cooperative effort between the Child Support Enforcement and TANF teams, the State held a joint training session to teach staff how to operate both computer systems.