Summary: Each year, millions of Americans seek help in obtaining child support services from the Department of Health and Human Service's Office of Child Support Enforcement and state child support programs. The Office reported an estimated caseload of about 20 million custodial parents seeking such services through the child support enforcement program in 1995--a 50-percent increase over the 1991 caseload. States collected nearly $11 billion in child support payments in 3.8 million cases, or about 19 percent of the caseload. GAO reported in 1994 that the child support enforcement program lacked essential management tools that would allow it to improve its responsiveness to the child support needs of children and families. GAO recommended that the Office focus its program management on long-term outcomes by (1) strengthening its partnership with state and local child support enforcement programs, (2) developing its own management strategies for achieving national program goals, (3) reorienting its audit functions to assess state program results, and (4) redesigning the federal incentive funding structure to provide greater incentives for better state performance. This report assesses the Office's progress in responding to GAO's recommendations.
