An Audit Report on the Child Support Program at the Office of the Attorney General
March 2004
Report Number 04-024
Overall Conclusion
The Office of the Attorney General (Office) generally administers the Child Support Program so that child support payments are disbursed to custodial parents accurately and in a timely manner. The majority of payments are processed by the Office's State Disbursement Unit (SDU) vendor, and we determined that the vendor processes payments in accordance with federal law and the terms of the contract. We also determined that the Office's contract monitoring function generally does a good job of managing the $130 million SDU contract.
However, the Office needs to improve the physical security and tracking of the payments processed by its Payment Processing section, which totaled more than $172 million in fiscal year 2002. In addition, weaknesses in controls over access to child support information systems create a risk that unauthorized individuals could make inappropriate changes to case information. Child support collections totaled approximately $1.5 billion in fiscal year 2002.
We did not identify any irregularities in our tests of the accuracy of data shared between the major information systems used for processing child support transactions, the Texas Child Support Enforcement System (TxCSES) and Stradus.
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