The Department of Human Services (DHS) agrees with the findings. Economic Security Administration (ESA) agrees with the documentation issue, which is compounded by the lack of interface between the reporting data systems.
This requires collaboration efforts between multiple units within ESA that in...
The Department of Human Services (DHS) agrees with the findings. Economic Security Administration (ESA) agrees with the documentation issue, which is compounded by the lack of interface between the reporting data systems.
This requires collaboration efforts between multiple units within ESA that includes the Division of Customer Workforce Employment & Training (DCWET), the Department of Program Operations (DPO), and the Division of Innovation and Change Management (DICM). ESA needs to enhance DCAS to tie the income evidence in the income support case to the employment evidence in the person record to allow the employment hours to end date once the income evidence is end dated. The Office of Performance Monitoring (OPM) has a process in place to monitor and confirm the hours reported from CATCH; however, the process to monitor and verify the hours received from DCAS needs to be strengthened to capture and resolve discrepancies in work hours. During the monthly Q5I reviews, we found multiple discrepancies from the data received from DCAS showing that the customer was not employed during the sample month or fiscal year; but hours were reported in Q5i.
When OPM conducts their review of DCAS hours, and identifies income and hour differences, the DPO is informed and/or the Office of Work Opportunity (OWO) requests their assistance with resolving the discrepancy.
While this was a temporary fix for the problem, however, a permanent solution would require a
multi-faceted approach:
(1) Training (re-training) all DPO SSR on the DCAS screens which require action to confirm employment. This means that the DPO should dedicate resources to provide adequate training to SSRs involved in updating customers’ employment information in DCAS. While this would be a short-term solution it will go a long way to resolving some of the discrepancies in reported work hours that are being transmitted to Q5i.
(2) Requiring DICM to enhance DCAS to tie the income evidence in the income support case to the employment evidence in the person record to allow the employment hours to end date once the income evidence is end dated. Her suggestion is to have Brian initiate the meetings between DCWET, DPO, and DICM. This would be automating the process by connecting the 2- step process into one task. This would be a permanent solution to curbing stale and unsubstantiated hours from migrating to Q5i.
(3) Continuing to randomly select and review a sample of 40 cases from Q5i each month. OPM monitors will randomly generate 40 sample cases from Q5i, review them and if they find any discrepancies would refer them to either OWO, DPO, or TEP Providers for resolution.
(4) Continuing to cross-reference all customers assigned to a vendor to verify that each customer’s DCAS hours are confirmed by OPM during its participation audit process. OPM will continue to ensure that all customers’ participation documents are uploaded in Fileshare during each bi-weekly audit cycle.
Contact - Christian Okonkwo, Program Manager, Office of Performance Monitoring, DHS/ESA
Estimated Completion Date - DICM will create a Jira ticket to enhance DCAS to tie the income evidence in the income support case to the employment evidence in the person record to allow the employment hours to end date once the income evidence is end dated. This process will take four (4) months, September 30, 2024, to complete.
DPO will train (retrain) all DPO SSR on the DCAS screens which require action to confirm employment. The training will last up to six (6) months, March 30, 2025.
See Corrective Action Plan for chart/table