Child SUPPORT

May 1, 2006

With the addition of the workload from LA County, the iCapture subsystem within the California child Support system is now prividing automated data capture for over 50,000 transactions per day. contact Bruce Lechner at 925-280-0010, ext 20 to arrange a tour of this site in Sacramento, California which is maintained and operated by First Data Government Solutions(FDGS).

CHILD SUPPORT PROCESSING SOLUTIONS

Based on Federally mandated requirements, the California Franchise Tax Board was given the responsibility to design, develop, implement and operate a State wide solution for the collection and distribution of payments associated with child welfare. This responsibility had previously been vested with the individual Counties within California and FTB faced the challenges of developing a single system that would meet all Federal requirements as well as the unique requirements and operational criteria that had supported individual County business needs. With a design volume of up to 75,000 transactions per day and stringent requirements for the total time required for the deposit and distribution of funds received, the project represented the largest Child Support Automated System that would be implemented within the United States.

To meet the requirements and design specifications for this project, Impression Technology, teaming with Bank of America, First Data Government Solutions, and Unisys Corporation, created a customized version of iCapture fully integrated with the Unisys Remittance and Lockbox system. The system requirements included the need to image multiple types of documents including envelopes, checks/money orders, payment coupon/list that would contain participant information and all types of correspondence received with any transaction. In the data capture area, the project presented many unique challenges, all of which were addressed by the customized version of iCapture developed for this engagement. Among the distinguishing features of the iCapture solution are:

Transactions that are received frequently include various formats of payment coupons/lists, which contain identifying information on multiple participants (or fund contributors). In order to take advantage of OCR/ICR recognition technology, Impression Technology developed a unique capability to locate the required fields before OCR/ICR based on prior payment information and specialized image-processing technology. The enabling OCR/ICR recognition on these unstructured payment coupons/lists improves the data capture productivity by 60%.
Each participant needs to be uniquely identified in order to credit the contributed fund into the right account. Because Child Support processing had previously been the responsibility of individual Counties it was determined that up to eleven different IDs had been previously used to identify participants in this program. These included SSN’s, last names, and various participant/case numbers, which all have similar format and hard to distinguish. Not knowing the type of IDs in most cases, Impression Technology developed a special participant-matching algorithm to uniquely identify a participant with two or more remitter supplied IDs.
Because most of the child support payments are deducted from the payroll in a recurring basis. The prior payment records of a particular remitter can be browsed and edited to match the current payment coupons/lists, which further improve the data capture productivity.

If you are interested in learning more about this project, or how Impression Technology can help your organization, please contact Bruce Lechner at 925.280.0010, ext. 20 or email sales@impression-technology.com.