New Hampshire moves child-support system into the cloud
The IT service provider Conduent on Wednesday announced that it recently closed a contract with the New Hampshire Department of Health and Human Services to provide a new, cloud-based system for collecting and disbursing child-support payments.
The new system contains automation features, payment methods and disaster recovery capabilities that weren’t present in a previous system running out of the state’s data center, said Karen Hebert, director of the department’s Division of Economic Stability.
“That’s what people really expect, that the services that government offers are up to date and can keep up with the external environment, so we want to be able to do that,” Hebert told StateScoop. “I think having the state disbursement unit outsourced in this manner really is a huge benefit to the state because we can access that kind of technology.”
The state’s child-support system serves 31,000 families across the state and distributes $75 million in child-support payments to parents each year, she said. A Conduent press release explains that parents paying child support now also have new payment methods, including PayPal, and that it may soon allow additional platforms, including Apple Pay, Google Pay and Venmo.
“As part of the implementation, Conduent leveraged its solution that allows staff to view disbursement information and quickly process child support transactions,” the press release reads. “With comprehensive dashboards, the technology helps state representatives quickly and accurately match high volumes of payments to their respective cases.”
Hebert said the new system offers higher-resolution document imaging, more efficiency in scanning documents, more export features and — most importantly — disaster recovery and business continuity features that will ensure the state can meet its federal requirement of dispersing child-support payments within 48 hours of receiving them from individuals or their employers.
“This is all about making sure that families do receive their child support,” she said. ”This is for some individuals their only source of income.”
