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Welfare Reform -- a Network Approach

According to federal law, families who have received welfare assistance for five years are no longer eligible to receive cash benefits. How will states keep track of the data and ensure recipients do not exceed their benefits?

The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 dramatically changes the nation's welfare system into one that requires work. Along with work requirements, it provides for time-limited financial assistance while program participants are not yet employed. The key phrase is "time-limited."

The federal law insists that families who have received assistance for five years are no longer eligible to receive cash benefits. According to the American Public Welfare Association (APWA), five years is a cumulative lifetime limit. States will have the flexibility to set the time limit to less than five years, or provide some hardship exemptions and non-cash assistance and vouchers for services to families.

There is an outstanding issue raised by the time limits: Who is going to keep track of this data? Since the five-year term is cumulative and a family may actually receive benefits from more than one state, how will states ensure that a family has not exceeded its benefits? In an open meeting in Illinois, Robert Wright, the state's director of the Department of Public Aid, declared that he expected the "federal government will develop a system or database, but they have not yet made a plan public."

Donna Morea, vice president of the Human Services Group at American Management Systems, said the federal government can save a lot of money for itself and the states. She said, "They don't need a monolithic national database in order to track down information on a national basis. People don't need to be where their data is to access it anymore -- you can use Internet-based technologies, like Alta Vista from DEC to eliminate technical problems associated with the states' different technical platforms and systems interfaces."

Morea explained that "the beauty of a network approach is that it doesn't require a big new database development project." Instead, states would need a common identifier for clients to use a network-based technology to access information from one another. "The welfare community could share more than time-of-benefits information," she said, "they could share case history information that could be utilized to get better family outcomes."

AAMVANET
There are departments and agencies from outside the human services world that have confronted the need to share information about individuals across state lines, and have utilized network strategies to do so. For example, states share traffic records of their drivers using AAMVAnet, a self-supporting, not-for-profit affiliate of the American Association of Motor Vehicle Administrators (AAMVA).

Bobby Watlington, operations manager at Virginia's Department of Motor Vehicles, explained that in response to federal mandates, the association contracted with the IBM Information Network to provide a network service to handle requests via the National Driver's License Registry or the Commercial Driver's License Information System. Basically, a state sends an electronic message through AAMVAnet, which checks its database to see if the information is immediately available (which happens only if there has been a recent request for the same data), then sends an electronic request to the states that would have registered the driver. When the electronic request is received, the state processes it automatically and sends a return message with the requested data. It is a lights-out automated transaction. The service is funded through a combination of membership fees each state pays, along with network service charges based on utilization. Watlington said, "Considering the challenge AAMVA faces -- each state having different systems -- overall it's working very well."

NCIC
Another example of states sharing data via a network is the National Crime Information Center (NCIC). Using this network, states share criminal records they collect locally with law enforcement officials across the country. Sgt. Tim Allue explained that Pennsylvania has a system known as the Commonwealth Law Enforcement Administrative Network (CLEAN) that has an automated interface with the NCIC system supported by the U.
S. Department of Justice (DOJ) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation. He gave the following scenario: "Texas has a wanted individual that they record in their system and post on the NCIC system, a state trooper making a traffic stop in Pennsylvania (Pa.) will send a message to CLEAN, which will check on outstanding warrants, first in Pa., and then in an automated pass through CLEAN it will query NCIC to see if there are any warrants from outside of Pa.

If Texas has explicitly listed the individual," Allue explained, "the state trooper will not only see that there is an outstanding warrant, but will send a realtime confirmation that the individual in question is with the trooper. Texas will have the opportunity to request that the individual be held for possible extradition. If Texas doesn't reply within a short while, the trooper will have a name and phone number of a law enforcement officer in Texas to talk with regarding the individual." He added that "it is incumbent on the law enforcement professional to update the system when the incident regarding an individual is resolved."

Sgt. Allue feels that the system works well for the law enforcement community, to help them share information and resolve law enforcement issues across jurisdictions. Funding for NCIC comes from DOJ, with the states responsible for their own internal system.

RISKS
The human services community has proven that there is much risk in building large systems, especially those that retain personal information like welfare status. The lack of success in child support enforcement systems are testament to those risks. Even before Internet- and intranet-based technologies were well known, states looked to network repositories and data indexes to solve the problem of sharing. Morea pointed to the Internal Revenue Service's national database to allow processing centers to share taxpayer information. "It was all that they could do at the time, but it was very expensive and very high risk."

Before time runs out on APWA and the Department of Health and Human Services, they (and the states) need to look at best practices from other government professionals. It may seem like they have unlimited time to solve this problem, but just ask TANF recipients -- 60 months goes by fast if you don't try hard to become self-sufficient.

Larry Singer -- an expert on strategic computing with 12 years experience in the information technology industry serving all levels of government -- is currently a research fellow with the Strategic Computing and Telecommunications in the Public Sector program at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government. E-mail: .

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