Welfare to Work

Under the Family Support Act of 1988, families trying to work their way off of welfare can receive up to 12 months of child care and medical assistance. Insufficient data prevent GAO from fully analyzing the issue of transitional benefits, including factors affecting their use, and how long families receive such benefits. GAO concludes that evaluating transitional benefits will prove complex and challenging. Unless the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) renews its evaluation planning and data collection efforts, HHS will probably be unable to report to Congress next year on the impact of transitional Medicaid on welfare dependency. In addition, the evaluation of transitional child care will be in jeopardy unless a strategy and schedule for completing it are developed. The number of families receiving transitional benefits grew during the first 15 months of the program. Yet many state policies, despite federal notification requirements, do not require that families be told about benefits when they become ineligible for welfare. Some state policies also prohibit families from applying for benefits retroactively within the 12-month eligibility period. Until these state policies are reviewed and brought into compliance with federal requirements, families in these states will be at greater risk of being uninformed about and have limited access to transitional benefits.

GAO found that: (1) most states lack readily available data to evaluate the success of their efforts to deliver transitional benefits; (2) state case loads for transitional benefits increased during the first 15 months after the benefits became available; (3) not all states comply with legislative and regulatory requirements to inform families about transitional benefits; (4) not all states comply with HHS regulations that allow families to request TCC and begin receiving it after their AFDC benefits are terminated; and (5) mandated HHS evaluations of transitional benefits have not progressed beyond initial design work that HHS began in early 1990.

Recommendations

Our recommendations from this work are listed below with a Contact for more information. Status will change from "In process" to "Open," "Closed - implemented," or "Closed - not implemented" based on our follow up work.

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