Output 2—Child Support Agency: General Manager's review
Page contents:
- Improving our service
- Working in partnership to support separated parents
- Ensuring system integrity
- Supporting our people
- Into the future
This year has been a time of significant change and further achievement for CSA. I am proud to be joining an organisation that plays such a key role in assisting the wellbeing of children.
I wish to acknowledge the very significant contribution of my predecessor, Catherine Argall, in leading CSA to achieve a Bronze Award at the 2005 Australian Business Excellence Awards. CSA is the first Australian Government Agency to achieve this level.
In the coming year, I am looking forward to working with the team of highly committed staff at CSA, with our government colleagues in other agencies and with our partners outside government to further improve the services we deliver to Australia’s children. CSA’s positioning within the new Department of Human Services (DHS) provides us with new opportunities for more effective collaboration in service delivery to the Australian community.
Improving our service
CSA improved its business results in 2004–05: the rate of transferral of child support payments within Australia continued to rise, with 96 per cent of all liabilities collected, showing an improvement compared to 95.4 per cent in 2003–04. In total, parents paid $2.4 billion in child support payments. Consistent with the thrust of our business strategy, more parents than ever
(52.4 per cent of all cases) now pay their child support directly to each other. Of concern, however, is the rise in unpaid child support among our international clients. This will be an area of focus in the coming year.
Consistent with the underpinning rationale behind the establishment of DHS, CSA began a program of improving service for clients common to Centrelink and CSA. Now, when clients of either organisation need information about their entitlements from the other agency, they can have a phone conversation with both agencies simultaneously. We also worked closely with DHS to realise synergies from joint initiatives and procurement, as well as providing an integrated service delivery perspective on the implementation of the Attorney-General’s proposed Family Relationship Centres.
Our e-business pilot was successful. We will extend this in 2005–06 so that parents will be able to register, access statements and letters, and change their addresses and other details online.
During the year, we embedded our innovative client satisfaction survey, Clients Having a Say, throughout the agency. This measure gives us an ongoing, real-time measure of our clients’ satisfaction, in terms of our charter commitments, with the service that we provide. The month-by-month results provide a great input to development and improvement.
Working in partnership to support separated parents
In November, our innovative workplace program Staying Connected won the prestigious gold award at the Prime Minister’s Awards for Excellence in Public Sector Management. Staying Connected is a three-hour educative program delivered to fathers in the workplace, developed through a partnership between CSA, Interrelate (a community counselling organisation) and major employers. The program was independently evaluated three months later, with some outstanding results:
- 58 per cent average increase in commitment to having a business-like relationship with the other parent
- 28 per cent average increase in commitment to being an effective father
- 30 per cent average increase in ability to cope
- 35 per cent average improvement in ability to concentrate on the job.
New versions of the Staying Connected program have been developed for unemployed parents and for parents using children’s contact centres.
The third booklet in our ‘Me and My’ series, What about me?—Taking care of yourself, was launched in October. It continues our focus on providing practical, easy-to-read information on issues that separated parents say are important to them. A CD-ROM, Dealing with Separation, presents the information from the booklets in an interactive format. Feedback from clients on the usefulness of both these products has been outstanding.
The Newly Separated Unemployed Parents project has continued, with the development of the Being Connected telephone and group program. The project aims to help recently separated parents who are not living with their children and who are receiving Newstart Allowance to improve their parenting and relationship skills. It also aims to increase their motivation to return to work. In the first six months of 2005, more than 1,000 people accessed the telephone service, with CSA ‘hot linking’ (providing a three-way telephone service) for 60–100 clients a week.
The challenge in 2005–06 will be to get the right information and support to every separated parent in Australia and to work more closely with our other key stakeholders. This will help us improve our services to parents—a focus for the coming year.
Ensuring system integrity
The CSA Business Strategy promotes voluntary compliance wherever possible. However, for those who choose to ignore or try to avoid their responsibilities to support their children, CSA has a suite of interventions to help ensure compliance.
During 2004–05, CSA undertook various compliance initiatives to ensure the integrity of the child support system and to maintain public confidence in it. These included the ongoing Intensive Debt Collection (IDC) initiative and a new, more direct approach to collections throughout CSA. The IDC initiative collected an additional $51.5 million in child support and contacted more than 30,000 clients who have child support debts.
CSA also had success with the Late Payment Penalty Offer, which allows clients who pay their debts an opportunity to have the late-payment penalties cancelled. Departure Prohibition Orders have also been effective in enabling CSA to resolve outstanding child support payment issues with clients.
Through these activities, CSA reduced its domestic child support debt from $749.5 million to $738.7 million during this year.
The 2004–05 financial year was also a year of development for CSA’s international stream, as country-based segmentation evolved—the New Zealand team and other country-based cells were incorporated within both Australian and international collection and enforcement teams. These initiatives will enable more specialised services to be developed to assist international clients.
In a significant initiative to support the Australia–New Zealand Reciprocal Agreement, information on 3,400 cases was transmitted between the two countries. This resulted in $22 million in child support arrears being sent to Australia for registration and collection.
The active international case load grew during 2004–05 by 3,502 cases (20 per cent) to 20,992. This follows previously high annual case load growth and reflects the impacts of globalisation, the increased utilisation of international child support arrangements and improved service relationships between central authorities.
CSA collected and transferred $4.8 million in child support to New Zealand parents and children during 2004–05. A further $3.8 million was collected and transferred to parents across the rest of the world. Despite these achievements, the debt from international cases continues to rise.
Supporting our people
A key focus in 2004–05 has been the development of the Human Resources Strategic Plan, to guide our work over the next three years. This plan identifies our key priorities and strategies across nine human resources areas. These will be our key areas for action in coming years.
We negotiated a new agency certified agreement that achieved overwhelming support from staff. The agreement focuses on balancing our organisational performance with the wellbeing of our people and relies on effective communication and information-sharing strategies for successful achievement of CSA goals and commitments. It also provides the opportunity for better job satisfaction for individual employees.
A focus of our learning and development in 2004–05 was creating improved understanding of the roles and responsibilities of leaders. Customer contact skills and techniques for making skilled referrals were key learning areas across the organisation. The feedback and action-planning process following from the new staff survey, My Say in CSA, will provide a great platform for improving the issues that really matter to staff at the team level. Implementation of strategies to better manage unplanned leave will be a focus for the coming year.
Into the future
With CSA’s sound history of achievement as a foundation, we now have an opportunity for a new beginning. In 2005–06, CSA will embark on a new phase in its development—a reform agenda to improve our customer service and focus and develop stronger, more effective relationships with our key partners and stakeholders. A key theme will be a greater emphasis on being more proactive and connected in government. Specifically, we will:
- work across agencies to advise government on the implementation of the Parkinson Taskforce report In the Best Interests of Children—Reforming the Child Support Scheme
- build better partnerships with stakeholders to ensure that CSA provides the very best possible service to Australian families and their children
- implement a proactive communications strategy, including more active engagement with the media and other stakeholders
- deliver more efficient and effective service delivery through continued collaboration with the Department of Human Services
- introduce further innovation in our service delivery, including better targeting of services to meet the differing needs of parents and new ways to help parents support their children
- improve support for our clients, such as a national service that will enable CSA to link distressed clients by phone to skilled counsellors from crisis support services
- work collaboratively across government to support the implementation of the proposed changes to the Family Law Act 1975, including the introduction of Family Relationship Centres
- more actively engage with parents to ensure that their feedback leads to improved service delivery
- renew our focus on CSA’s people and organisational capabilities to ensure that we attract, develop and retain the highly capable people we need, both now and into the future, and that we have the capability to effectively support service delivery.
The next two years provides us with a unique opportunity to take CSA performance and the effectiveness of the child support system in Australia to new, exciting levels. The challenge for us is to grasp the opportunity and deliver even better services to the Australian community.
Matt Miller
General Manager