Child Support Tribal

Outstanding issues germony on lues OMB has 2 remaining concerns with the proposed rule that I do not share. I'd like to get your views on them and then get back to OMB on this today. Match rate whats the consultation showing? Proposal: The statute is silent on funding formula or a specific amount to be set aside for tribal CS grants. Instead, as is the case for state CS programs, funding is available as needed in order to pay reasonable costs for operating approved CS programs. HHS considered funding based on performance or cost-per-child, but since programs will be new, HHS doesn't have enough info to base funding on these terms. Instead, they propose to have a 90:10 federal/tribe match, so that HHS would provide no more than 90 percent of the total approved in the budget of the CS program. States have a 66:34 match, but HHS has proposed a 90:10 match for following reasons: All other tribal programs w/o statutory specification have no match at all. Since these programs are fixed grants, rather than open-ended, like CS, HHS determined that a 10% commitment would be appropriate and fiscally prudent. Tribes are starting new CS programs. When CS program started in early 1970s, they began w/ 88% match, which continued for 15 years. Tribal economic conditions are not equivalent to states. Tribes have no tax base. Tribes are having difficulty with the 2 tribal programs (child welfare) that have a higher match rate of 75%, which was statutorily set. Two smaller programs, Head Start and ANA have an 80% match, but tribes are exempt with a waiver. OMB concern: the 90:10 match is unnecessarily generous. OMB proposes to increase the match to somewhere between 50:50 and 90:10. Recommendation: I have weighed in that 90:10 seems appropriate, and that it would be unreasonable to go beyond the state match of 66:34. Distribution Proposal: Tribes have flexibility to design their own distribution process. If a tribe elect to assign child support rights of current tribal TANF families to the tribe, the tribe may choose whether to pass-through collections to the family or retain funds. If they keep the collections, tribes are NOT required to reimburse the federal government for their share (90% if we kept the 90:10 match) as states are. OMB concern: the distribution policy of not reimbursing the federal government will (1) discourage tribes from passing through collections to families so they can retain the collections (up to amount received in TANF), and (2) result in federal losses. OMB proposes the rule either