Get Full Government Meeting Transcripts, Videos, & Alerts Forever!
Get email alerts on the Child Support Guidelines topic
No spam. Unsubscribe anytime.
Lawmakers hear testimony on bill to add oversight and contractor checks to Montana child support guidelines
Summary
A House committee heard competing testimony on HB352, which would create a citizen oversight committee for Child Support Services Division (CSSD), require outside verification of the state’s child-support calculator, and specify reporting and procurement steps; DPHHS called the bill duplicative and raised procurement concerns.
Representative Schomer on Wednesday brought House Bill 352 to the House Health and Human Services Committee, saying the measure would revise Montana’s Child Support Guidelines, establish a guidelines review oversight committee, set reporting requirements, and require the Department of Public Health and Human Services to contract with a private software vendor to verify the state calculator.
An expert witness, Temple McLean, testified for the sponsor and urged the panel to consider long-standing checks and balances. "Setting forth regulation into statute offers Montana residents the best assurance that fairness is retained," McLean said, describing MTCS (formerly a vendor developed by Nick Bordeaux) as a decades-long private check that historically produced calculations within a dollar of the department’s results. McLean warned the Child Support Services Division’s recent internal recommendations could remove significant variables — including tax treatment — and said a CPA-level review is needed.
The department opposed the bill. "This bill is overly prescriptive and duplicative," Christy Trudowski, division administrator for the Child Support Services Division at DPHHS, told the committee. She cited federal rules (45 CFR 302.56(h)) and existing administrative rules as already requiring a guidelines review committee and a public comment process, and said the bill would shift policy authority from the agency to a committee that meets quarterly.
Patrick Quinn, an attorney providing legal services to DPHHS, added that the state receives substantial federal funding for the program and that rulemaking and guidelines operate within established federal-state processes. He said additional layers of oversight could slow CSSD’s ability to respond nimbly to program needs.
Support came from Kelsen Young of the Montana Coalition Against Domestic and Sexual Violence, who said the measure could improve communication and give affected parents more voice in program decisions. Sponsor Schomer also pointed to what he described as large TANF carryover funds and argued for better oversight.
Committee members pressed DPHHS on technical differences between software calculations, the eight statutory guideline factors considered in Montana’s calculations, whether the two systems weight those factors differently, and what examples of differing outputs would look like for parents at different incomes. DPHHS said its system follows the uniform guideline factors and that examples and additional details would be provided later. Jesse Counts, appearing as an informational witness, clarified the roughly $83,000,000 figure discussed is the statewide TANF carryover and not funds earmarked solely for CSSD.
The committee did not vote on HB352 during the hearing; Representative Schomer urged members to consider a do-pass once fiscal details are complete. A fiscal note was requested and pending at the time the hearing closed.
Next steps: the committee closed the hearing on HB352; if the sponsor requests executive action later, staff said a fiscal note and more technical examples (including calculator output comparisons) would be supplied.
