EFT/EDI Child Support Payments

Teleconference

Minutes from the Federal/State Agencies EFT/EDI Child Support Payments Project Teleconference, January 18, 2006

Participants

The Federal agencies represented on the teleconference were the Department of the Treasury's Financial Management Service (FMS): Headquarters, Washington, DC, and Kansas City Financial Center, Kansas City, MO, Department of Agriculture's (USDA) National Finance Center (NFC), and Federal Office of Child Support Enforcement (OCSE), Open4 (software developer). The states represented were: AL, CO, DC, FL, GA, HI, IA, IL, MO, MS, MT, NC, ND, NE, NV, OH, OR, PA, PR, SD, TX, UT, WA, and WI.

The bi-monthly Federal Agency/State EFT/EDI Child Support Payments Project teleconference meeting was held on Wednesday, January 18 at 2 p.m., ET. Lovenia Murray of FMS facilitated the meeting and reminded participants to register in advance for each teleconference at FMS's web site at http://fms.treas.gov/csp/confcall/index.html. Minutes from the teleconferences are posted at this web site.

Federal agency updates:

Ninety five percent of the federal payroll agencies' child support payments (deducted from employees' payroll checks) have been converted to e-payments. One federal agency not yet converted is the Department of State. The USDA's National Finance Center (NFC) will be taking over their payroll in August of 2007, and will convert the child support payments to e-payments.

SSA: The Social Security Administration (SSA) is working on implementation of its National Garnishment Project and is testing with at least one state. New orders (attaching benefit payments for child support) will be the first to be converted to e-payments in March 2006.

RRB: The Railroad Retirement Board (RRB) hopes to begin sending electronic payments for child support (withheld from benefit payments) by September 2006.

VA: The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) payroll will be taken over by the Defense Finance and Accounting Service (DFAS). FMS will confirm whether or not this includes the benefit payments attached for child support.

PPD format issue:

FMS asked whether any states are still receiving payments in the PPD format. Several states (AR, OH, SD, and UT) indicated that they are still receiving some voluntary allotments in that format, which does not include the DED Child Support Addendum Segment that states need to post the payment automatically. AR reported that they had been in conversation with Jim Raynor of DFAS Denver Jim.raynor@dfas.mil to determine when these payments could be converted to the CTX 820 file format.

TX upcoming systems integration:

TX reported that because of upcoming systems integration, they will not be posting payments between 1/31/06 and 2/6/06. States and employers should continue to send payments, but they will not be posted during this time. TX will put an announcement to this effect on the EFT/EDI list serve.

Next federal agency/state EFT/EDI teleconference:

The next EFT/EDI teleconference is scheduled for March 15, 2006 at 2:00 p.m. ET. States are reminded to register for the teleconference at http://fms.treas.gov/csp/confcall/index.html to ensure enough lines are allocated.