Achievements and challenges

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Child Support Agency
Achievements and challenges

The Child Support Agency helps parents who do not live together meet their responsibility for supporting their children financially.

By 30 June 2002, over 1.2 million Australian parents were registered with us, translating to 667 957 actual child support cases. Our 2600 staff in 16 metropolitan sites and 22 regional centres delivered services to them.

We can confidently claim to be a world leader in assessing and transferring child support—we've won awards this year to prove it:

• The Australia Quality Council presented us with an award for progress towards business excellence.
• We won two gold and one silver medal at the Service Charter Awards for Excellence for our service delivery, including:
  — excellence in integrating our service charter into core service delivery outcomes and organisational culture
  — excellence in service delivery to rural, remote and regional Australians
  — excellence in service charters driving online service delivery.

Mark Sullivan, Lisa Paul and Child Support Agency staff at an award ceremony recognising excellence in the Service Charter Awards

We transferred just over $1.45 billion between parents for the benefit of children in 2001–02. Around $814.2 million was transferred through private payments and $636.4 million through our collections.

Our clients are becoming more self-reliant—private collect performance is now at 49.4 per cent, exceeding our pricing agreement annual target of 48 per cent. The collection rate since scheme inception for CSA-collect cases is now almost 88 per cent. The total collection rate (which includes private collection cases) is over 93 per cent.

For our clients:

• We put to work a new IT system, Cuba, to improve operational efficiency, staff productivity and client satisfaction. Regrettably, the installation caused some delays in processing changes and getting information out to some parents. We've worked hard to fix these short-term problems, and Cuba is now living up to its potential to deliver quality outcomes for our clients.
• We set up a national telephone system to improve our client support. For example, it gives individually case-managed clients direct access to their case officers.
• We now also ask our clients to register with us by telephone rather than by completing a form in the Centrelink office. Early indications are that direct phone registration has improved parents' satisfaction with the service they receive.
• We entered into a joint initiative with Centrelink, the Family Court of Australia and the Federal Magistrates Service to help separating families navigate their way through the family law system.
• We launched nationally the Supporting Parents Referral Service and a joint project with Relationships Australia on primary dispute resolution.
• Working with FaCS and Centrelink, we contributed to the Family Law Pathways Advisory Group Report recommendations. We continue to seek to influence Australians Working Together based on our knowledge of separated parents' needs.
• We provided impetus for a package of legislative reforms that:
  — support second families who have an additional reason for changing the child support assessment formula
  — make changes to the Family Tax Benefit and Child Care Benefit income tests
  — introduce departure prohibition orders to prevent non-resident parents from leaving Australia when they have persistently failed to meet their child support obligations.

For our staff:

• Our new broadband staffing structure has continued to improve organisational capability and reduce staff turnover (it is now at less than 12 per cent). We are confident that improved service and client satisfaction will flow from this investment.
• Training programs for team leaders will strengthen their ability to support their staff in delivering quality client service.
• An independent survey of our staff (by Corporate Health Index) showed significant improvements in their performance against key indicators over the past 18 months. The greatest improvement was associated with business priorities.

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