Benefit and loan programs provide cash or in-kind assistance to individuals who meet specified eligibility criteria. Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), SSI, Food Stamps, housing assistance, and student loans are representative of such programs. Some programs are administered centrally by federal agencies (such as SSI), while others are administered by states and localities (such as TANF). Benefit and loan programs often have difficulty making accurate eligibility and payment amount decisions because applicants and recipients provide much of the information needed to make these decisions, and the programs do not always have effective ways to verify that these individuals are fully disclosing all relevant information. The symposium, entitled “Data Sharing: Initiatives and Challenges Among Benefit and Loan Programs,” was sponsored by GAO and the Chairman and Ranking Minority Member of the Senate Committee on Governmental Affairs. It was an impartial and balanced forum to explore the successes, problems, and possible future directions of data sharing among benefit and loan programs. The symposium consisted of an opening address by Sally Katzen, Deputy Director for Management of OMB, and four panels composed of four to six speakers each. Ms. Katzen’s talk highlighted both the importance of data sharing and the need to protect individual privacy in the course of such sharing. Panel speakers then discussed how data sharing has benefited their programs, how technology offers new data- sharing possibilities, the privacy and security concerns that arise in a data- sharing environment, and how data sharing can be advanced among benefit and loan programs governmentwide. Panel speakers, who came from a variety of federal and state benefit and loan programs and the private sector, included officials from SSA, the Department of Labor, OCSE, the Department of the Treasury, and state human services departments, as well as representatives from the financial services industry and privacy advocates. Appendix I contains the symposium agenda, including the names and complete titles of the speakers. Many of the symposium speakers and audience participants referred to the National Directory of New Hires (NDNH). The Congress mandated that OCSE create this database as part of welfare reform primarily to aid in collection of interstate child support payments. The NDNH is maintained by OCSE and, to a large extent, is derived from reports that private employers and states are required to file containing information on newly hired employees, quarterly wage information, and quarterly unemployment insurance (UI) information. In addition, this database contains information on newly hired federal employees and quarterly wage information on all federal employees. OCSE matches these data against information it has on parents who are involved in child support cases and forwards the matched results to the state child support offices responsible for collecting the payments. The Social Security Act limits access to the NDNH to specific agencies for specific purposes. For example, Treasury (including the Internal Revenue Service ) has access to the NDNH to administer federal tax laws and to verify claims for the Earned Income Tax Credit. SSA also has access to help it administer the SSI and Old-Age, Survivors, and Disability Insurance (OASDI) programs. More recently, the Department of Education was granted access for purposes of obtaining the addresses of individuals who have defaulted on student loans or who owe grant repayments to Education. Sally Katzen, Deputy Director for Management of OMB, kicked off the data- sharing symposium by highlighting the importance of data sharing in achieving one of the top objectives contained in the administration’s 2001 budget proposal: verifying that the right person is getting the right benefit at the right time. This objective is being accomplished in part by data sharing among agencies to identify when improper benefit and loan payments have been made to program recipients. Several symposium participants representing major benefit and other programs reported that shared information is predominantly used in computer matches. That is, an agency compares the information it has on its program recipients against a file from another agency containing similar information to detect discrepancies, such as undisclosed income or assets. Once such discrepancies are detected, the agency investigates to determine if improper payments have been made and, if so, takes action to collect any overpayments and, sometimes, to remove the individual in question from the program. Agencies find such computer matches cost-effective because computers do most of the work. According to one symposium speaker, Pete Monaghan, an SSA official, the cost-benefit ratios of matches range from $20 to $40 of savings for every $1 spent to perform the match. Symposium speakers estimated that substantial savings accrue to programs that use computer matches to detect improper payments. According to Mr. Monaghan, SSA saves about $675 million annually by matching its OASDI and SSI program rolls against data from 10 to 12 federal agencies and 4,000 state and local jails to identify ineligible or overpaid individuals. (See table 1.) Mr. Monaghan also explained that SSA provides data that it maintains on U.S. workers and SSA program recipients to 10 to 12 federal agencies and all states and U.S. territories, and that the use of these data results in annual savings of $1.5 billion. Finally, many states have begun to participate in multistate matches, known as Public Assistance Report Information System (PARIS) matches, to identify welfare recipients who receive simultaneous benefits in more than one state. At the time of the symposium, two PARIS matches had been conducted, and 13 states and the District of Columbia had participated in the most recent one. Although comparable match results among participating states do not exist, Elliot Markovitz, from the Pennsylvania Department of Public Welfare, provided indications of the matches’ effectiveness by reporting the results for the District of Columbia and selected states, including Pennsylvania. Pennsylvania and the District of Columbia determine results by estimating their annual savings for such public assistance programs as TANF and Food Stamps as a result of removing individuals from their rolls because they were found to be receiving benefits in another state. Pennsylvania estimated its annual savings at $2.8 million and removed 566 individuals from the rolls. These individuals accounted for nearly 16 percent of all cases that Pennsylvania county workers investigated as a result of the two matches. The District of Columbia put its annual savings at about $1 million and the number of individuals removed from the rolls as a result of one match at 382. These individuals accounted for about 18 percent of all PARIS cases investigated by the District of Columbia. Another agency that obtains a substantial amount of data from outside sources, OCSE, also made a presentation at the symposium. Although OCSE does not make benefit or loan payments, it is responsible for helping state child support offices collect child support payments from parents who are obligated to make such payments. In some cases, the law requires that these payments be used to offset public assistance benefits that the custodial parents received during periods when their ex-partners owed them child support. OCSE has data from two sources that are instrumental in collecting child support payments: the NDNH and financial account information on individuals from financial institutions. Donna Bonar, Acting Associate Commissioner at OCSE, reported that in Texas, the amount of child support payments collected increased $4 million (32.6 percent) the month after that state automated wage withholding and began using the results from the NDNH match and in Virginia, child support collections increased by an estimated $13 million (33 percent) in 1 year as a result of the NDNH match. For the financial institution match, OCSE submits electronic files containing the names of individuals who are delinquent in their child support payments to about 3,000 financial institutions, and these institutions respond to OCSE when such individuals have accounts with them. Over a three-quarter period (July 1999 through March 2000), OCSE received information pertaining to more than 879,000 individuals with accounts totaling approximately $3 billion. Child support offices are able to collect lump-sum payments from delinquent child support obligators on the basis of these accounts. Ms. Bonar reported that the highest lump-sum payment collected was $74,000, of which $34,000 went to the state to reimburse the TANF program and $40,000 went to the custodial parent, and lump-sum payments commonly range from $20,000 to $30,000. Symposium speakers also discussed technologies that are expanding data- sharing opportunities and that offer new possibilities for data security. Three of the data-sharing applications discussed involve computer applications that make direct communication among computer systems possible. All three of these applications offer benefits to the government and the public, including the ability to verify program participant information and thereby detect improper payments sooner, or perhaps prevent them altogether. Integral to these discussions was how access to, and use of, shared information could be appropriately limited to official personnel for authorized reasons related to program administration. Another technological advancement discussed at the symposium was biometric identification systems, which are used to help ensure data security and prevent improper payments. These automated systems scan parts of the human body and, through a comparison with a previous scan, verify a person’s identity. Three presentations focused on how technology has enabled government agencies to request information from and transmit it among different types of computer systems via the Internet or other network. These exchanges are possible because new types of software can facilitate communications between computers, translating information from one system into a format that is understandable by another system and end user, a capability known as interoperability. With interoperability, clusters of related computer systems can be linked, allowing information to be accessed and shared by many programs with similar purposes. In one presentation, Marty Hansen, with SSA, and Ian Macoy, with NACHA—The Electronic Payments Association, focused on how agencies might access financial account information electronically from financial institutions. For benefit programs whose payments are based on need, agencies must know about the assets of applicants and recipients to determine what payment, if any, individuals are entitled to receive.