(Washington, DC) The Attorney General for the District of Columbia, Linda Singer announced today that Office of the Attorney General, Child Support Services Division (CSSD) has been awarded the National Child Support Enforcement Association's "Most Improved Program" and "Best Manager" Awards. The award recognizes the significant progress made by the District government, particularly in identifying fathers and securing new child support orders. Herb Jeter, Fiscal Operations Section Chief, received the award for "Best Manager" based upon his excellence and hard work for over twenty years at CSSD.

CSSD worked with DC Superior Court to establish more new child support orders and increased the number of referrals to the Court by 47% in 2006. The District has made steady progress in increasing child support collections by using enforcement tools more effectively. The increase in arrears collections is attributed to its 2005 Amnesty program (over a two-week period), driver's license revocations, passport denials and new wage withholding approaches.

CSSD has used many innovative approaches to improve its services, including providing the most generous policy for the treatment of child support for families on Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF). Under the policy, TANF families are allowed to keep the first $150 of current support paid every month with no reduction in their TANF grant, which means that non-custodial parents know that their payments will help their children, not repay the government. In the first six months of the policy, $1.2 million dollars was passed through to families. As another incentive, the District, also, passed an earned tax credit law to allow credits toward DC taxes for child support paid. The District was awarded in 2006, a federal child support demonstration grant to proactively assist incarcerated parents in modifying their child support orders. Those parents are able to return to their families without the added burden of child support obligations that they cannot pay and that might strip them of the incentive to obtain legitimate employment.

Herb Jeter began his tenure in CSSD on September 30, 1985 as a Child Support Enforcement Aide, where he managed the work of five staff members and cleared a backlog of over 5,000 cases. He next served as a Support Enforcement Specialist and managed a caseload of 600 clients and was responsible for accurate collection, disbursement and posting of child support payments. He analyzed laws, regulations and court rulings to determine arrearages on public assistance cases and calculated the correct amount due to customers in the District. As Supervisory Support Enforcement Specialist, he managed a staff of 12 and was responsible for distribution of all child support collections on TANF cases and the distribution of tax intercept payments on other cases. In his current position, Fiscal Operations Chief, he oversees the Audit and Program Management, Wage Withholding and State Disbursement Units. He is responsible for collection and disbursement of nearly $50 million in child support payments for 78,000 cases.

In 2005, CSSD had 85,117 IV-D (public assistance) cases serving 87,000 children - more than in the DC public schools. CSSD collections distributed to these families in that year were $55 million. Attorney General Linda Singer noted that "Awards like these underscore the efforts of our child support services program and the Office of the Attorney General, as a whole, to perform public service at the highest levels and steadily improve upon the services that we provide the residents of the District of Columbia."  The Director of the IV-D Program/Deputy Attorney General for CSSD, Benidia Rice commented that  "Our success means that more families in the District are getting the financial and medical support that they deserve. We've set ambitious targets for overall collections and we're really going to push hard to meet them."