1. Maintenance of Effort
States may count expenditures spent on aliens lawfully present toward their state maintenance-of-effort (MOE) spending requirement. States are also allowed to count child support dollars that are passed through to the family to count toward the MOE. This section allows states up to 45 days to file a quarterly report instead of the bill’s original one month requirement. This section also makes clear that money spent by the state to replace federal TANF funds lost due to a penalty shall not count as a qualified state expenditures.
2. Changes in Penalties
The act, in Section 5506, clarifies that reasonable cause exceptions to a penalty shall not apply to: failure to repay loans, failure to maintain state effort, failure to adhere to the child support provisions; failure to maintain the 100 percent MOE under the contingency, and failure to replace block grant funds lost due to a penalty. Finally, this amendment would conform the TANF penalty provisions to Title IV-D’s new emphasis on performance measures: the secretary may penalize states using graduated penalties that range between 1 and 5 percent of the TANF block grant amount and the penalties may be for failing to meet the paternity establishment percentages or other performance standards of the child support program or for either failing to submit required data or for submitting unreliable data to the secretary. Before penalties are imposed, the state has a year for corrective action.