AUGUSTA – The Maine Department of Human Services was recognized Friday as a national leader in devising an effective program for establishing, enforcing and distributing child support.

Dr. Sherri Z. Heller, commissioner of the federal Office of Child Support Enforcement, was in Maine Friday to present DHS officials with a certificate confirming that the state had met all of the requirements established in the federal welfare reform legislation passed in 1996.

Heller, acting DHS Commissioner John R. Nicholas, and Stephen Hussey, director of the department’s Bureau of Family Independence, Division of Support Enforcement and Recovery, commended dozens of state employees during a brief ceremony in the Hall of Flags of the State House.

The DHS staffers have worked together to create a seamless program aimed at tracking the income of parents with child support obligations and working with parents to ensure support payments are up to date.

“I do see a noteworthy lack of fighting over turf among the human service agencies here,” Heller said, emphasizing that pertinent information kept by different agencies is routinely shared. “I’ve actually seen fights about things like that [elsewhere]. People here have gotten past the silo approach to realize that it’s families that we’re talking about. So people here tend to look at families as ‘a family’ rather than a ‘program recipient.'”

Newell Augur, director of Public and Legislative Affairs for DHS, said the support and recovery division assists about 64,000 families on a daily basis. Since its inception in 1974, the division has collected in excess of $1 billion. More than 70 percent of the money was sent directly to Maine families. The remaining amount was used to repay the state for public assistance funds provided to the families of those who were delinquent in their child support payments. Total collections were approximately $100 million in both 2002 and 2003.

Part of the state’s success in collecting support payments has pivoted on a program that penalizes a parent who is delinquent in his or her payments with the potential loss of state licenses, including driving, professional, fishing and hunting licenses. Heller said some states are reluctant to impose license revocation as a tool until they hear how much money Maine raises from delinquent parents during moose-hunting season.

“I have people in other states around the country wondering how they can import moose,” she quipped. “By the same token I would also say the program here in Maine is quite balanced. If someone has the ability to pay and won’t, they’re aggressively using enforcement tools such as license revocation. On the other hand, there is also a very active access and visitation program here for people who pay regularly and want to be involved in the lives of their kids.”

License revocations, Augur said, have increased tenfold from 400 in 1996 to more than 4,000 in 2003. He added that the department’s ability to collect from parents living outside the state had mushroomed from $11.6 million in 1996 to $24.2 million in 2003. Augur said the improved compliance was due almost exclusively to advances made in cooperative agreements between states and standardized computer programs used to track and verifies income.