|
Home | Human Services | Massachusetts HHS – Work Participation Rate services
Case Study: Leveraging state expenditures for the Massachusetts TANF program
The Client:
Commonwealth of Massachusetts, Executive Office for Health and Human Services
The Case:
How Massachusetts successfully leveraged unmatched general fund expenditures across multiple state health, human services, and education agencies in order to:
- Meet the TANF Work Participation Rate (WPR) through the use of the Excess MOE Caseload Reduction Credit; and
- Draw new federal revenue through TANF Contingency Fund and the Emergency Contingency Fund
The Need:
Massachusetts, like many states, was concerned with meeting its Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) Work Participation Rate (WPR)measurement after the passage of the Deficit Reduction Act (DRA) of 2005.One strategy to improve the likelihood of passing the WPR performance measure is to lower the target rate through the
Excess MOE Caseload Reduction Credit.
Massachusetts also needed to improve its federal block grant financing practices. Over time, several state agencies became involved
in managing various federal block grants with limited coordination and cooperation among agencies.
This led to lost opportunities for
maximizing the use of federal funds and often resulted in increased General Fund spending.
Massachusetts partnered with PCG Human Services™ to assist the state in meeting the federal WPR performance measure as
well as to help improve their federal grants management through a broad review of federal and state spending
across the entire spectrum of the state budget.
The PCG Human Services™ Approach:
As the first matter of course on each PCG Human Services™ project, the PCG Human Services™ project team developed a close working partnership with
the Executive Office of Health and Human Services (EOHHS) and the Department of Transitional Assistance (DTA) by establishing
clear channels of communication and visibility into the project progress. PCG Human Services™ then engaged in the following primary activities:
The PCG Human Services™ team performed a comprehensive review of the State’s federal block grants and developed a plan to improve
cash flow and reduce General Fund expenditures – without changing any programmatic aspects or service delivery
PCG Human Services™ assessed a wide array of state funded programs and services to determine how strongly the program was aligned to
one or more of the four TANF purposes and how difficult they would be to claim as TANF MOE. The assessment was
informed by PCG Human Services’s™ deep TANF fiscal, regulatory, and programmatic knowledge forged over a decade of experience in
TANF financing and program design projects.
PCG Human Services™ assisted EOHHS and DTA prepare federal claims to include newly identified TANF MOE expenditures for inclusion
toward the Excess MOE Caseload Reduction Credit as well for the TANF Contingency Fund spending
requirements.
The Result:
The PCG Human Services™ project identified an additional $1.7 billion of untapped TANF-eligible spending across 44 state programs. From these
identified expenditures, Massachusetts benefited directly by:
- Successfully avoiding a Work Participation Rate (WPR) penalty in FFY 2007 through the contribution of $88 million toward the Excess MOE Caseload Reduction Credit.
- Bringing in nearly $200 million in new federal revenue through the TANF Contingency Fund and becoming eligible for millions more though the Emergency Contingency Fund.
Additionally, PCG Human Services™ helped the state make substantial changes to its fiscal management processes in order to comply with the Deficit
Reduction Act of 2005 (DRA) and the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) and to avoid financial penalties.
|
