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Diversion of Income to Legal Dependents
A couple of years before I became supervisor of the Systems Analysis Section, I was a Policy Systems Analyst in the Bureau of Field Administration. In May 1975, the policy group in the Bureau of Assistance Payments proposed that we discontinue the practice of diverting income to legal dependents in ADC cases. ADC is Aid to Dependent Children, also called Aid to Families of Dependent Children (AFDC). At that time, federal funds were available only to assist families in which children were deprived of support of a parent by reason of separation, divorce, death, unemployment, etc. “Legal dependents” were “their” kids in a family in which both parents were in the home, but one parent had children from a prior union or was the “caretaker relative” of a relative’s children. If the family income was low enough, they qualified for ADC, but only the needs of the eligible children and the parent/caretaker relative could be budgeted when calculating the ADC grant. If, however, there was any family income, it could be applied to the needs of the legal dependents before it was subtracted from the “total requirements” of the eligible group to determine the grant amount.
I should mention before going on that after nearly 30 years, I remember very little of this, but as you will see, I kept a lot of memos.
The legal dependent issue was raised in a 5/1/75 memo to Jerry Brockmyre, Director of the Bureau of Assistance Payments, from Bob Johnson, director of the Division of Programs and Procedures, to which was attached a memo from staff member Bill Dailey in which he listed 4 options. Bob said he would personally opt for #4, which would stop altogether the diversion of income to legal dependents. He acknowledged that this is a controversial and, in some quarters, an emotional subject but our current practice is blatantly discriminatory in that we only recognize legal dependents if there is income to divert on their behalf and ignore “legal” dependents if there is no income to divert.
In other words, if we can’t help all legal dependents, let’s not help any of them.
In a 5/22/75 memo signed by Jerry Brockmyre, Bob presented the options to the regional directors. Apparently he got the response he wanted, because the policy change went forward.
Although my job was implementing policy, not making it, I did not feel compelled to mind my own business. I thought stopping the diversion of income to legal dependents was stupid, and I made my case in a 10/21/75 memo to Bob Johnson. I began as follows:
Federal regulations give us the option of allowing or not allowing income to be diverted to the needs of legal dependents in ADC cases. However, they also prohibit the consideration of income that is not actually available to the client. Since Michigan’s Poor Law requires a person to relieve, support, and maintain his spouse and his children, it could be argued that the amount of money necessary to support such “legal dependents” is not available to the so-called “eligible group”. I suggest we get a legal opinion on this before we change our policy.
In the remainder of the memo, I argued against the plan to create a separate case records for the legal dependents and the rest of the family.
What was referred to as the Poor Law was Section 401.2, MCL:
A few days after my memo, on 10/28/75, Bill Dailey wrote a memo to Bob Johnson arguing that separate case records would be simpler for the caseworker and less likely to cause errors. And then he countered my argument that the Poor Law required diversion of a parent’s income to his legal dependents (children) by noting that it is required only if the parent is of “sufficient ability”, and since the ADC parent is receiving public assistance, he wasn’t of sufficient ability. He was using the family’s poverty to justify reducing its ADC grant. He based his argument on a memo from the evil Joel Hott, who additionally asserted that one is not poor unless the Department has so determined.
A clue to the real reason for the change in policy may have been Bill’s claim that intermingling programs confused workers. I think simplification was the motive, but it was not the workers they were concerned about. These folks were the policy writers, and they weren’t generalists. Some wrote assistance payments policy, others wrote medical assistance policy. Writing policy for a family in which some members received assistance payments, some received medical assistance, and some received both could be complicated. I think it was their jobs they wanted to simplify.
On 10/29/75, Bob Johnson sent a memo to Bill Obenaus, Director of the Bureau of Field Administration, saying they appreciated our concerns, but they were going ahead with the project.
I appealed to Jerry Brockmyre in an 11/24/75 memo sent under the signature of my supervisor, Don Brown. It was a very persuasive memo, if I do say so myself. Look at that last sentence of point #2 on page 1:
I was not always such a liberal. Back when I was a caseworker for the Mason County DSS in Ludington, in my first job after college, I took pride in keeping the monthly grants of my Old Age Assistance and Aid to the Disabled clients as low as possible. I remember talking about one case to co-worker Jerry Harvey. He told me that our job was not to save money for the state/county – it was to help our clients as much as possible within the law. His advice changed my attitude for the rest of my career at DSS.
Around the end of 1975, I became a supervisor of the Systems Analysis Section in the Division of Administrative Procedures. It was a new unit, and one reason it was formed was my 12/17/75 plea to Jerry Brockmyre for help. I reported to Don Czinder and he reported to Brockmyre. I had 2 or 3 people under me.
My brilliant memo of 11/24/75 didn’t change any minds. On 1/9/76, Wes Priest wrote a memo to Don Czinder under Bill Dailey’s signature asking us to proceed with the system changes necessary to stop the diversion of income to legal dependents.
In a 1/15/76 memo, Don Dersnah, one of my staff members, argued yet again against creating separate case records for legal dependents. But he seemed to accept the inevitability of discontinuing the diversion of income to legal dependents by his statement “when the State stops diverting case income to the needs of legal dependents…” He said “when”, not “if”.
I still had not given up. In a 1/26/76 memo to Don Czinder, I acknowledged that there were certain kinds of income that should not be diverted to the needs of legal dependents, but I explained how we could avoid doing so and still divert the income that could legally be diverted.
In the last paragraph of my 1/26/76 memo, I referred to an “IBC.” IBC stands for Inter-Bureau Clearance, a process in which policy changes are circulated to all the bureaus for review and approval. In my 12/17/75 memo to Brockmyre pleading for help, I said there was a 4 or 5-month period when I ghost-wrote the CIS (Client Information System) Manual. I had moved from BuMIS to the Bureau of Assistance Payments, and although the responsibility for the manual didn’t go with me, it was still my baby. One thing that persuaded Management to officially turn it over to me was the discovery that I had written a straight-faced IBC critique on behalf of the Bureau of Assistance Payments of CIS procedures I myself had written.
In a 1/26/76 memo to Brockmyre, Don Czinder made a new argument for not creating a separate MA case for the legal dependents. He said it fell into the realm of procedure rather than policy, so importance should be given to the preferences of the Administrative Procedures Unit. His memo apparently won a small concession. In a 2/11/76 memo to Czinder written by Wes Priest for Bill Dailey, he says that although separate cases would be created, they would be assigned to the same worker.
I made one last attempt on 4/22/76. I went over a few heads and addressed a memo to Deputy Director Lois Lamont. I didn’t argue for diverting income to legal dependents. Instead, I suggested we include them in the eligible group as “essential persons”, a concept recognized in the federal regulations.
Someone must have asked about the financial impact of diverting income to legal dependents, because Don Dersnah did some research and estimated in a 5/5/76 memo to me that stopping the diversion would save the state $14,879 a month. But he said there would be some costs involved, too, and suggested that “we are in danger of being penny-wise and pound foolish.”
Victory finally came at a 6/9/76 meeting of the Executive Committee. The record of that meeting says the following people were present:
John T. Dempsey, Director Paul Allen, Chief Deputy Director Lois Lamont, Deputy Director, Citizen Services Administration Joseph LaRosa, Deputy Director, Field Services Administration Richard Miller, Executive Assistant to the Director (ex-officio)
Item 4 on the agenda was “Diverting Income to Legal Dependents in ADC”:
Although the diversion of income continued, the procedure for doing so changed. It would no longer be done by the computer. When calculating the income to be subtracted from ADC family’s total requirements, the worker would subtract the legal dependent allowance. Bill Daily asked us to prepare the system changes in a 6/24/76 memo. I wrote the system specifications for the change and submitted them on 7/14/76. |
