Public Act 90-0074 of the 90th General Assembly
Public Act 90-0074
SB755 Enrolled LRB9003229SMdv
AN ACT to amend the Illinois Public Aid Code by adding
Section 12-4.33.
Be it enacted by the People of the State of Illinois,
represented in the General Assembly:
Section 5. The Illinois Public Aid Code is amended by
adding Section 12-4.33 as follows:
(305 ILCS 5/12-4.33 new)
Sec. 12-4.33. Welfare reform research and
accountability.
(a) The Illinois Department shall collect and report
upon all data in connection with federally funded or assisted
welfare programs as federal law may require, including, but
not limited to, Section 411 of the Personal Responsibility
and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 and its
implementing regulations and any amendments thereto as may
from time to time be enacted.
(b) In addition to and on the same schedule as the data
collection required by federal law and subsection (a), the
Department shall collect and report on further information
with respect to the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families
("TANF") program, as follows:
(1) With respect to denials of applications for
benefits, all of the same information about the family
required under the federal law, plus the specific reason
or reasons for denial of the application.
(2) With respect to all terminations of benefits,
all of the same information as required under the federal
law, plus the specific reason or reasons for the
termination.
(c) The Department shall collect all of the same data as
set forth in subsections (a) and (b), and report it on the
same schedule, with respect to all cash assistance benefits
provided to families that are not funded from the TANF
program federal block grant or are not otherwise required to
be included in the data collection and reporting in
subsections (a) and (b).
(d) Whether or not reports under this Section must be
submitted to the federal government, they shall be considered
public and they shall be promptly made available to the
public at the end of each fiscal year, free of charge upon
request. The data underlying the reports shall be made
available to academic institutions and public policy
organizations involved in the study of welfare issues or
programs and redacted to conform with applicable privacy
laws. The cost shall be no more than that incurred by the
Department in assembling and delivering the data.
(e) The Department shall, in addition to the foregoing
data collection and reporting activities, seek a university
to conduct, at no cost to the Department, a longitudinal
study of the implementation of TANF and related welfare
reforms. The study shall select subgroups representing
important sectors of the assistance population, including
type of area of residence (city, suburban, small town,
rural), English proficiency, level of education, literacy,
work experience, number of adults in the home, number of
children in the home, teen parentage, parents before and
after the age of 18, and other such subgroups. For each
subgroup, the study shall assemble a statistically valid
sample of cases entering the TANF program at least 6 months
after its implementation date and prior to July 1, 1998. The
study shall continue until December 31, 2004. The Department
shall report to the General Assembly and the Governor by
March 1 of each year, beginning March 1, 1999, the interim
findings of the study with respect to each subgroup, and by
March 1, 2005, the final findings with respect to each
subgroup. The reports shall be available to the public upon
request. No later than November 1, 1997, the Department, in
consultation with an advisory panel of specialists in welfare
policy, social science, and other relevant fields shall
devise the study and identify the factors to be studied. The
study shall, however, at least include the following
features:
(1) Demographic breakdowns including, but not
limited to, race, gender, and number of children in the
household at the beginning of Department services.
(2) The Department shall obtain permission to
conduct the study from the subjects of the study and
guarantee their privacy according to the privacy laws.
To facilitate this permission, the study may be designed
to refer to subjects by pseudonyms or codes and shall in
any event guarantee anonymity to the subjects without
limiting access by outsiders to the data (other than
identities) generated by the study.
(3) The subjects of the study shall be followed
after denial or termination of assistance, to the extent
feasible. The evaluator shall attempt to maintain
personal contact with the subjects of the study, and
employ such methods as meetings, telephone contacts,
written surveys, and computer matches with other data
bases to accomplish this purpose. The intent of this
feature of the study is to discover the paths people take
after leaving welfare and the patterns of return to
welfare, including the factors that may influence these
paths and patterns.
(4) The study shall examine the influence of
various employability, education, and training programs
upon employment, earnings, job tenure, and cycling
between welfare and work.
(5) The study shall examine the influence of
various supportive services such as child care (including
type and cost), transportation, and payment of initial
employment expenses upon employment, earnings, job
tenure, and cycling between welfare and work.
(6) The study shall examine the frequency of
unplanned occurrences in subjects' lives, such as illness
or injury, family member's illness or injury, car
breakdown, strikes, natural disasters, evictions, loss of
other sources of income, domestic violence, and crime,
and their impact upon employment, earnings, job tenure,
and cycling between welfare and work.
(7) The study shall examine the wages and other
compensation, including health benefits and what they
cost the employee, received by subjects who obtain
employment, the type and characteristics of jobs, the
hours and time of day of work, union status, and the
relationships of such factors to earnings, job tenure,
and cycling between welfare and work.
(8) The study shall examine the reasons for
subjects' job loss, the availability of Unemployment
Insurance, the reasons for a subject's return to welfare,
programs or services utilized by subjects in the search
for another job, the characteristics of the subjects'
next job, and the relationships of these factors to
re-employment, earnings, job tenure on the new job, and
cycling between welfare and work.
(9) The study shall examine the impact of mandatory
work requirements, including the types of work activities
to which the subjects were assigned, and the links
between the requirements and the activities and
sanctions, employment, earnings, job tenure, and cycling
between welfare and work.
(10) The study shall identify all sources and
amounts of reported household non-wage income and
examine the influence of the sources and amounts of
non-wage non-welfare income on employment, earnings, job
tenure, and cycling between welfare and work.
(11) The study shall examine sanctions, including
child support enforcement and paternity establishment
sanctions, the reasons sanctions are threatened, the
number threatened, the number imposed, and the reasons
sanctions are not imposed or are ended, such as
cooperation achieved or good cause established.
(12) The study shall track the subjects' usage of
TANF benefits over the course of the lifetime 60-month
limit of TANF eligibility, including patterns of usage,
relationships between consecutive usage of large numbers
of months and other factors, status of all study subjects
with respect to the time limit as of each report,
characteristics of subjects exhausting the eligibility
limit, types of exceptions granted to the 60-month limit,
and numbers of cases within each type of exception.
(13) The study shall track subjects' participation
in other public systems, including the public schools,
the child welfare system, the criminal justice system,
homeless and food services, and others and attempt to
identify the positive or negative ripple effects in these
systems of welfare policies, systems, and procedures.
(f) The Department shall cooperate in any appropriate
study by an independent expert of the impact upon Illinois
resident non-citizens of the denial or termination of
assistance under the Supplemental Security Income, Food
Stamps, TANF, Medicaid, and Title XX social services programs
pursuant to the changes enacted in the federal Personal
Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of
1996. The purpose of such a study must be to examine the
immediate and long-term effects on this population and on the
State of the denial or termination of these forms of
assistance, including the impact on the individuals, the
alternate means they find to obtain support and care, and the
impact on state and local spending and human services
delivery systems. An appropriate study shall select a
statistically valid sample of persons denied or terminated
from each type of benefits and attempt to track them until
December 31, 2000. Any reports from the study received by
the Department shall be made available to the General
Assembly and the Governor upon request, and a final report
shall be submitted upon completion. These reports shall be
available to the public upon request.
Section 99. Effective date. This Act takes effect upon
becoming law.