3. Southeast Regional Child Support Enforcement Unit Improvement Plan

Southeast RCSEU Improvement Plan Introduction As provided for in the Calendar Year 2007 Budget Instructions to RCSEU's, dated June 30,2006: Each region is to develop a plan for improving its performance by a minimum of 2% over its FFY 2006 performance (excluding PEP where the status quo will suffice) to be calculated at the close of federal fiscal year 2006. These plans will be due January 1, 2007 and each January thereafter. The plans were not required to be in any particular format, but were expected to explain how each RCSEU intended to accomplish the goal of increasing performance as measured by four federal performance measures, by 2%. The four measures are Support Orders, Current Support, Paying Arrears, and Cost Benefit Ratio. The following plan will address how the Southeast RCSEU in Fargo intends to improve performance. The plan considers each performance measure separately, first by describing the measure and data, second by analyzing what obstacles/opportunities exist, and finally by what actions the Unit will take to improve performance. The plan does not include any "hard number" goals, since the measures are a bit of a moving target. Without knowing what the "base" of the measure is, it is impossible to know what the target "numerator" needs to be. I. Support Orders Description This measures the effectiveness of one of the program's fundamental duties - making sure that children have support orders. This measure is the percentage of cases open at the end of the review period that have orders established. Line 2 = Line 1 Cases open on September 30 with support order established Cases open on September 30 For FFY 2006, of9,007 open cases, the Fargo region had 7,857 cases with orders established, for a percentage of87.23%. Of the eight regions, this percentage was ranked seventh, with the top region having a percentage of 91 .09%. 1