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Jennifer Noonan, 23, and her children, Taima Willeto (left), 5, and Wenona Willeto, 3, receive cash assistance for needy families, food stamps and a federal housing voucher. Noonan says she's desperate to get off welfare by getting an education but will postpone community college to participate in a required job training program. She found a temporary job at Wal-Mart during the 2013 holiday season but was unemployed in January.
(Yuxing Zheng/The Oregonian/2013)
of the welfare program in Oregon has found "little to no progress" in moving recipients off the program and into jobs.
Program managers failed to hold recipients accountable for missed jobs appointments and sometimes went years without significant contact with recipients, according to the audit from the
.
The audit, released Wednesday, comes as Oregon
for
, the cash welfare program for very poor families. About 91,400 Oregonians in 34,300 families received TANF in February, according to
from the
.
The number of Oregonians receiving TANF more than doubled during the recession. While other states tightened eligibility criteria to conserve dwindling funds, Oregon kept the program doors open in part by slashing money for related jobs programs, reducing subsidies for child care and transportation, doubling case loads for program managers, and cutting contractors, including ones who helped recipients with addictions and mental health problems, the audit found.
“During the recession, the Legislature made the right decision to prioritize financial assistance to families living in poverty,” Secretary of State Kate Brown said in a press release. “Now as we pull out of the recession, we need to do everything we can to help the most vulnerable Oregonians participate in Oregon’s economic recovery.”
Oregon supplemented federal money for TANF with $166 million in general fund money in the 2007-09 budget cycle and boosted that to $254 million in the current 2013-15 cycle, a 53 percent increase.
The Oregon Legislature in 2011 cut state spending for client services by half and kept staffing flat.
The state also granted a hardship exemption from 2008-12 that exempted TANF recipients from the five-year lifetime limit on welfare benefits. Because of state exemptions, in the 17 years since welfare reform has been implemented, Oregon has never ended benefits for any recipients who received benefits only while living in Oregon.
"Oregon has enforced time limits only on a few clients who moved from out of state," the audit said.
Audit authors noted that DHS is in the midst of converting eligibility worker positions into 162 case manager positions. The audit recommends that DHS raises its expectations of recipients, improves client services, better tracks individual progress and makes other improvements.
The audit also recommends the Legislature revisit recession-era decisions, give case managers more flexibility to deal with uncooperative clients, reduce the sudden drop in benefits when TANF recipients find work and better incentivize recipients to find work.
DHS Director Erinn Kelley-Siel wrote in her response letter that the department will prioritize funding for jobs programs as money becomes available among other improvements. The services were cut during the recession because jobs didn't exist.
"Because jobs were in short supply for even the most qualified job-seekers, the Legislature chose to prioritize TANF's family stability side," Kelley-Siel wrote. "It left the cash assistance side of the program in place as part of a safety net for children and drastically reduced employment supports and services for adults in the program."
Check
later for more.
-- Yuxing Zheng