Foster Care Overpayment Scenarios

Foster Care Overpayments

Juvenile cases are particularly prone to overpayments. This is due to several factors, including but not limited to: interface issues, child moving from one placement to another, and communication issues.

Foster care & custody changes

Child support is either E or F when the child is in a paid placement on the first day of the month. Conversely, if the child is in the custodial parent’s (CP’s) home on the first day of the month, child support would be owed to the CP.

Direct Payments & Active Foster Care

OSIS does not have the functionality to process foster care overpayments. If a non-custodial parent (NCP) made direct payments to the CP or the foster parent while the child was in foster care, credit must be given on CFPL for the payments up to the amount of the NCP’s balances (the worker will not create a credit).

Adoption Cases

It is important for a district office to actively work the Finalized Adoption Report (DHS adoptions only) in order to avoid overpayments. The report is sent out to local office management staff on a quarterly basis. The report can also be found at P:\Adoption Lists. If the report is not worked, current support will continue to accrue erroneously.

Overlapping Foster Care & TANF Time Period

Sometimes a foster parent will receive Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) and foster care maintenance payments at the same time. When this occurs, current support should be charged as E or F (whichever is applicable) since the maintenance payments are larger than TANF payments. There are several factors to keep in mind when working these kinds of cases:

Notify both Adult and Family Services (AFS) and Child Welfare of overlapping time frames. AFS will recoup the overpayment from future foster care benefits (Child Support Services [CSS] will not pursue the overpayment).
When the child is placed in kinship foster care, make sure the case is cross-referenced correctly and the balances are accruing against the correct obligation (OBL)/CP combo.
If the kinship parent receives TANF on a C/H case, the foster care medical case must be properly cross-referenced with the child support case once TANF ends. If this does not occur, the current support will issue to the kinship parent creating an overpayment CSS must pursue.

Note: Because there are interface issues between OSIS and the PS2 system, sometimes the interface will cause all foster care time frames to be deleted. If this occurs, the only way to view this information is to access CTHL<space>[child sequence number]. The transaction is a little difficult to read, but is the only way to recover case type history that has been deleted or overridden. To prevent future deletions, contact CFB to set the Bypass (CHB) flag.

For more information about juvenile finance processes, see the Juvenile Finance training documents.