Illinois Department of Healthcare and Family Services Child Support Advisory Committee met Nov. 15.
Here are the minutes provided by the committee:
Committee Members Present via WebEx/Phone:
Darryl Apperton, Maggie Bennett, Turyia Clay for Honorable Iris Y. Martinez, Geraldine Franco, Dr. Kirk Harris, Juanita Harris and LaTanya Law for Secretary Grace Hou, Elizabeth Lingle, The Honorable Judge Pamela Loza, The Honorable Sidney Mathias, Nicole McKinnon, Jessica Patchik, Christine Raffaele, Richard Zuckerman
Committee Members Absent:
Maria Barlow, Trent Cameron, Howard Feldman, The Honorable La Shawn Ford, Christina Mahoney, The Honorable Alana I. Mejias, Phillip Mohr, Vickie Smith
HFS Staff Present:
Carrie Benson, John Cernich, Irene Curran, Patricia Dulin, Gina Hemphill, Hilary Johns Felton, Allen Nosler, Daun Perino, Sharon Shapiro, Steve Sharer, Christine Towles, Bryan Tribble, Eric Watson
Public Guests:
None
• Welcome to CSAC members – Bryan Tribble & Richard Zuckerman
➢ Richard welcomed everyone to the meeting. He asked everyone to please mute when they are not speaking. He reminded attendees that they can use the chat feature for any questions or comments.
➢ Roll call of committee members
➢ Introduction of state employees and members of the public
➢ Approval of September 13, 2022, meeting notes.
Motion made and seconded to approve as submitted.
• Old/New Business
➢ Old Business:
No old business
➢ New Business:
o Mandatory Training Information-John Cernich
John explained that mandatory training is required for all state employees including all CSAC board members. All members are considered part of the employee roster that goes to the 0ffice of the Executive Inspector General. Some of you are compliant with the mandatory training. You can go to www.onenet.illinois.gov/mytraining to check what trainings are outstanding. Some of the mandatory trainings are required by law and one of these is the ethics training. This is an executive order. All employees and committee members are required to complete this annually. We also have harassment discrimination prevention training. This training is statutory, which means all new hires within any state agency must complete this training within 30 days of state employment and annually thereafter. Employees that do not complete the training are deemed non compliant and their names are given to the Personnel office and shared with the office of the Executive Inspector General. Non-compliant state employees are subject to corrective action. The trainings are launched annually in January. You can log in anytime between January and December to complete the trainings. John urged all to login and test their login prior to December 27th in case there are problems. You can contact him with any questions.
• Quadrennial Review Discussion – Bryan Tribble & Richard Zuckerman
Bryan talked about where we are with the Quadrennial Review. He mentioned we have completed 20 public input town hall meetings. We received a lot of public input, and we are incorporating that into our final report. We also have a lot of data from the surveys we disseminated, which will also be part of the report along with all the questions we received in the chat and emails from the public. We also had a series of meetings with the judiciary, private attorneys, and the legal partners for the Department of Healthcare and Family Services. We had a good level of participation, and we received a lot of input on what works and what could improve. Everyone has been invited to participate in the meetings that have been occurring weekly on Fridays. We have had some other meetings periodically throughout October and into November that included various subject matter experts. Bryan walked through some of the topics we have discussed. He stated that we could go ahead and have a discussion and entertain a motion on those. Then we could follow that up with individual work group updates for the topics of imputation, incarceration, multi-family adjustments and parenting time.
1. Imputation of Income (Jessica Patchik’ s group)
➢ The group recommends that the Illinois Statute would be expanded to incorporate all 14 of the factors that are listed in the federal regulations as those that should be weighed by the courts.
➢ The group also recommends that instead of having a long listing, it would be listed in dot points.
➢ Finally, in order to input income, there should be some type of finding on the record, similar to how deviations are handled in Illinois. The Child Support Advisory Committee (CSAC) voted unanimously to adopt this recommendation.
Jessica’s group is going forward with the above recommendations.
Maggie mentioned Jessica also wanted to include 1 remaining factor from the current statute and manage the ownership by a parent of a substantial non-income producing asset. This would bring it up to 15 factors.
2. Incarceration (Jessica Patchik’ s group)
➢ The first thing that is currently implied in Illinois Statute and is not a presumption is that an individual who is incarcerated with a child support obligation, that it be set at zero. It is not explicitly stated that incarceration should not be treated as voluntary unemployment. The group is recommending this be added.
➢ The second recommendation made is that there should be automatic abatement without accrual of the child support obligation of the parent who is paying support of the obligor’s child support obligation. Their obligation should resume automatically following their release. The subcommittee got this far but didn’t have a firm recommendation on the time frame of when the obligation should resume. This is not something CSAC has to have as part of the final recommendation of this final report. The committee voted unanimously to adopt this recommendation.
Jessica’s group is going forward with the above recommendations.
Bryan will reach out to Jessica to ensure her group has what it needs to be successful. We have four groups moving forward with their drafting. That leaves a couple of items the advisory committee has chosen to not move forward with on making recommendations. Bryan asked if the committee wants to focus on finishing up these first four and then focus on the other ones, or if someone wants to form another group to begin looking at or drafting these remaining issues. They should be short sections where the issue is discussed, and the findings are shared based on the town hall surveys. Then the recommended action of no action at this time becomes part of the draft.
Maggie asked with respect to issues, such as updating the guidelines from BR4 to BR5, the cap at 25,000 vs. 30,000 are you talking about pages or a few paragraphs?
Bryan stated, that in his opinion, those would be a couple of paragraphs. He suggested that Steve Sharer talk to Dr. Venohr for the meat of the information. Then we would just have to do an introduction and a closing. Dr. Venohr is our expert as the economist. We will make sure Dr. Venohr has everything she needs.
Maggie volunteered to assist with drafting the remaining issues.
Liz Lingle has volunteered to go thru the entire report to make sure we are using the proper format, to ensure one cohesive group wrote it vs. smaller groups.
Bryan and Richard will work with Liz.
Richard discussed the draft deadlines. He said that we must disseminate on December 12th so the group can have a chance to review it prior to the meeting on December 13th. He suggested the smaller groups have a December 5th deadline for submittal of their drafts.
It was requested that the subcommittees submit their drafts to Caroline (Carrie) Benson. If anyone would need extra time, please send an email to Bryan and Richard and cc Carrie.
Maggie stated that in Colorado’s report they attached Dr. Venohr’ s Power Point and is wondering if we are going to do the same.
Steve mentioned we have a copy of it. Rich stated that it is part of the attached exhibits.
Maggie asked if we could attach the Illinois State Bar Association’s Family Law Section Council’s PowerPoint that we have used, that is 1 of the 2 formula’s that the council is focused on. We borrowed slides from Dr. Venohr with her permission. It is very easy and understandable. Maggie is to reach out to the CLE department to check on a release to use. She will send it to Eric once approved. Steve will send Dr. Venohr’ s PowerPoint to Eric as well.
Irene suggested we define the demographics we used when we did the surveys. Maybe mention the smaller groups i.e., domestic violence group and other forums, such as judges and other groups.
Richard mentioned including the chart from HFS that we used to determine how we broke up the town halls, the flyers we sent out to show the methodology of how we got our data.
Eric asked if we are including the Listserv data, we sent out 200,000 emails a couple of times. Do we need the number of registered attendees to the town halls?
Bryan said yes to the outreach information. It would be ok to list the community-based organizations and all the organizations to whom we sent the market materials. He stated that he would include all the marketing materials and briefly cover that the Child Support Services sent out more than 200,000 emails to all IV-D participants and list the dates when those were sent out.
Bryan will send Eric the color-coded map that was used when each of the regional offices was discussed and the counties in each of the regions.
Eric will include the Slidos.
Bryan suggested Eric look at the data and see what will make the most sense. The editing team and committee can decide on how to display the data.
Irene volunteered to help Eric compile the data.
Bryan asked the group if there is anything they/we may want to include?
Maggie asked about putting something in the report about the technology enhancements on the HFS website. She stated that her clients use the estimator. It is easy to use and very beneficial.
Bryan asked Eric to work with Rett to put something together.
Irene asked if we know or track how many people go to the calculator.
Eric stated that he can pull that data from a certain date. Bryan stated from July 1 of 2017 would be ideal.
December 2nd will be the final meeting prior to the deadline.
• Public Comments:
No comments.
• Meeting Adjourned
Motion made and seconded to adjourn.
https://www2.illinois.gov/hfs/SiteCollectionDocuments/November152022CSACNotes.pdf
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