In 1988, the federal government set new standards for child support systems, requiring every state to have a statewide, automated platform tied into an interstate network within the decade. South Carolina missed that deadline, and since 1997 has accrued $170 million worth of fines for its lack of compliance, on top of millions spent on failed contracts to get the state up to federal standards.
This year, however, the state finally solved its decades-old problem. South Carolina debuted a pilot electronic system in four counties in October 2018, and rolled out the system statewide at the end of this summer.
The central challenge, according to the state Department of Social Services project lead Jimmy Early, was wrangling data. “We had data in 47 different systems, one for each county and then one for the state,” he said. “Converting that data into one central system, and ensuring that we got the most current data when it was stored in multiple systems was difficult.”
The data management challenge had sunk previous attempts to upgrade as the state worked with multiple vendors to build a new statewide program. Each time a new company took up the challenge, they had to start from scratch.
This time, the state decided to work with Conduent, a company that runs 11 state disbursement units, the systems that distribute payments to custodial parents, and processes a third of all child support payments in the country. Conduent took a system they were already using in Delaware and converted it to work in South Carolina, which Early said was the reason the new system stuck.
“We were tired of trying to build a system from the ground up,” he said. “We were able this time to implement a system that would be a candidate for federal certifica ..
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