OKESC - Electronic Income Withholding Order Project

Toby Hallows: Okay, I'm going to go ahead and introduce Bill. Bill Stuart or William Stuart has been working in Child Support for over forty years now, I believe. And he used to be the child support coordinator in New York. I'm not going to even pronounce the county, I can't, Schenectady, I think. He also did systems design for the New York State Office of Child Support Enforcement. He was actually responsible for the design, development and implementation of New York statewide child support system, as well as the efforts to have the systems successfully certified in 1987 and 1997. He currently works with the Federal Office of Child Support Enforcement on the nationwide development and implementation of the Electronic Income Withholding Order Project. He has been very helpful to everyone who has ever spoken with him and he's one of those individuals that I think you will enjoy hearing from and I am going to put myself on mute and turn it over to Bill so that I can start working on some of these other issues. Thank you very much. Bill, take it away. 

Bill Stuart: Okay, thanks very much Toby. First, I want to thank Toby and Barbara and Joshua and anybody else in Oklahoma for setting this up and inviting me to present on the Electronic Income Withholding Order Project. This is a great opportunity. No one has to travel, just pick up the phone and listen and see if you would be interested in this particular project, which is called the Electronic Income Withholding Order Project or the EIWO. And you will hear me say EIWO a lot during this presentation. 

And I think up on the screen as you can see the first slide which is titled, "What is an EIWO?" And what I am going to walk through in this presentation is what an EIWO is, why we do it, how it works, and how your company or your organization can implement EIWO. Because you will hear and you will see during the presentation that we have a lot of employers now participating in EIWO and we have a wide variety of employers, even in Oklahoma. I'm going to mentioned four of them, you know there is a wide variety of type of organizations and employers that can join and have joined the EIWO. 

To start off with, what is it? What is EIWO? This is a project that was started by the Federal Office of Child Support back in August of 2004. It was eight years ago now. That enables states to electronically send the paper Income Withholding Order that all of you that are on the phone get today in the tens, hundreds or thousands of times a week, month or year. Rather than get the paper, you can get a PDF image-ready copy of the order delivered to a server every day. So again, rather than paper, this enables states to electronically send the Income Withholding Order to the employer. 

The second bullet here, the employers electronically acknowledge for each Income Withholding Order you receive as an employer you have to let the state know whether you're going to accept or reject the Income Withholding Order. If you do have the employee and you're going to accept the Income Withholding Order and start the deductions, you would let them know. And I've got samples of how exactly how you can do this using the various implementation options that we have. 

If you do not have, and we have already talked to one employer earlier that called in earlier in the call, if you donÆt have the individual there, it's very easy to let the state know you're going to reject it because that person either 1) is not there, or you have never even heard of the person. So you can let the state know right away so that they can update their records and not send you those reminder letters which I know most of the employers get, saying that after sending them an Income Withholding Order to you on paper saying, "Where's my money?" That letter or document usually arrives 30, 45 to 60 days after they sent you the paper Income Withholding Order. 

The next bullet. The portal - one point of contact. There's only one entity that employers and states have to interface with, with this project and that's the Federal Office of Child Support Enforcement portal. We are the ones who will send the orders to you and we are the ones who will come and pick up the acknowledgements from you. And IÆll go through exactly how the process works in a couple of slides. But this is not a case where you would have to go to multiple sites to pick up the orders or to drop the acknowledgements off, and to sign into different websites. This is not how this project runs. We always come to you. We drop the orders off and we pick up the acknowledgments seven days a week. 

The next bullet, the Federal Employee Identification Number, the FEIN is the key. That is the key to the kingdom for EIWO. Employers that want to go on EIWO and have gone on, give us all of their FEINs that they report to new hires and quarterly wage, we then pass those on to the states. Oklahoma was early on EIWO. As employers come on, I give Toby in Oklahoma the additional FEINs for those employers who joined, he puts them in a table in the Oklahoma system and when they go to issue, when the Oklahoma system goes to issue the Income Withholding Order, they check the FEIN in the employer records. If that FEIN is in the EIWO table, they will send the electronic record over to the folder where weÆre going to pick up from every day rather than sending paper. But the FEIN is the key. If you don't give me all of the FEINs, you will continue to get paper for those FEINs that you did not provide me. So, it's not your name, it's not your address, it's the FEIN that's the key. 

This process handles terminations, lump sums, original amended - basically anything that the state can do on paper, they can do electronically. This is not a project where you get the first one, you get the original one and the amends come on paper and the terms come on paper or whatever. Anything the state can do on paper, they can do electronically. So they can send you a termination if the order is over. They can send you notification or an Income Withholding Order for a lump sum or amendments and so on. Everything can go electronically. And again, for each Income Withholding Order you receive, you have to acknowledge it. You have to let the state know, "I'm going to either accept or reject it." 

We have a couple of implementation options. When we first started the project back in 2004, we only had what we called the "system to system." And as project plan went on and Toby... I mean I was out in Oklahoma back in 2006 or '07, we had started to develop another option on all the fillable PDF in spreadsheet, which has really enabled the program to grow. Fillable PDF and spreadsheet put the EIWO program within the reach of almost any employer who wants to be able to do this. It's system to system and I'm going to go through this in a little bit more, requires a three to five month IT effort. And a lot of companies don't have that. When I did these presentations in 2004 through 2006 and '07, we heard that. We decided to implement another implementation type that would, you know, be more in the employer's range of resources that are available. And that's the fillable PDF and spreadsheet. And those have been up and in production now for well over two years. 

Now thatÆs "What is the EIWO?" Why we do it? Primary reason - this gets the money to the family much faster. The Income Withholding Orders, and I'll go over the slide, the one after the next one over the process, but if Oklahoma had done an Income Withholding Order yesterday, depending where you are, you would've had it, if you're in Oklahoma or California or wherever, you would've had that Income Withholding Order today at 9:40am eastern time. So the turnaround time is very quick. That means that the payments can get to the family much quicker. 

The other reason, and this is the next slide which is titled "Get Rid of the Crates!" This is from Express Professionals out in Oklahoma City. This is Alana, and Renee Hicks who is the technical lead for the project and myself went out to visit Professionals many years ago and they're up in the EIWO. And this was one dayÆs volume for Express Professionals. They get thousands of these in a week. And they took us around and showed us their operation and Alana said, "Anything you can do to try to cut down on the volume of paper would be greatly appreciated." And we now have 25 states up and the volume of paper from Express Professionals have (inaudible). But it does help the employers a lot because it cuts down on the paper, it gets there much more quickly and the Income Withholding Orders go to different locations in your company and then have to get funneled, this takes care of that because they all go to one server and then get handled and processed. 

Next slide is the workflow or a process flow for the EIWO project. This is basically how it works. And after hearing this presentation and information, if youÆre interested in this and you go back to your company and you say, "Listen, I heard this thing and this sounds really good," they're going to send you to the IT department because you are going to have to have a server where we can drop orders off and pick acknowledgements up from. They're going to say, "How does it work?" This is the slide that you want to give them. I'm going to go through this quickly. Up at the top left-hand corner this would be, and I'll use Oklahoma as an example, the Oklahoma State Child Support System. And again, if you are on EIWO you've given me your FEINs and the first step is we, the Federal Office of Child Support Enforcement, go out to each state seven days a week, 365 days a year, and we pull the orders that Oklahoma and every other state thatÆs on the EIWO have generated that previous night that have been identified as being electronic. Oklahoma puts them in a file. They'll put all of the employers that they have Electronic Income Withholding Orders for in one file that we pick up. 

Step two, we bring them into the portal and we unbatch them. Because Oklahoma will have orders on any given day for the Department of Defense, for the Postal Service, for USPS, for Express Professionals, and so on. We'll take all of those orders in there for every state and we will unbatch them. And we will put Express Pr"s orders in a bucket for them. And for every state and the Department of Defense in a bucket for them and keep doing that until we have all of the files processed. So we unbatch them for the states, and then we validate them for errors to make sure that all the files that have come in, all of the required elements are there. And all of the syntaxes are correct and there are no errors in the file. That's to make sure that when employers get these documents, they have all of the required information, and itÆs all in correct places and it's all formatted correctly. And when necessary we transform the file from Oklahoma into a format that the employer wants. And like I said earlier we have a system to system and a fillable PDF and a spreadsheet for the acknowledgement. The employer tells us what format they want the acknowledgement to come to them. We will always offer an image-ready PDF copy of the order to employers. The acknowledgement can come in either a fillable PDF or an Excel spreadsheet. So, if an employer has signed up, they will tell us. We will take the file in from Oklahoma which is in a flat file format. Which the employer does not want. We will transform that into the format that they do want. So the employer will get the format that they want and that they can deal with. That helps the employers because now you don't have to worry, "Well if it comes in from Oklahoma, it's this and I've got to do it this way. Or it comes from New York and this way and I've got to handle it." We'll put it in the format that the employer wants. 

And then we get all... after we've unbatched them, validate them, put them in the right format for the employer we are going to send them to, we batch them by employer, and in step six, we push them to the employer. We always push the orders to the employer in step six. There is no option for employers to pick up any orders from us. We, being the Federal Office of Child Support, are a conduit between the states and the employers. We pick up the orders from the states, we pass them through on to the employer. So we don't have a database on all of the information. The state has that. Oklahoma has that. We do not. So we push the orders to the employer. As I said, we drop the orders off every morning that we picked up from Oklahoma that morning at 9:40am eastern time. So again, if they did one yesterday, you would've had it this morning at 9:40. 

Step seven through ten is basically the reverse of that for the acknowledgement. After an employer has received the orders, and they've created the acknowledgment or they filled out the fillable PDF or spreadsheet, we will pull them. And we got to pull the acknowledgements at around 9:10am eastern time, seven days a week. So we will go out and we will pull whatever acknowledgements the employer has ready for us. We will validate those for errors in step eight. And then we'll transform them into a save-specific file format. Every state's chosen flat so that's pretty easy for us right now. And then we batch those acknowledgements by state so that the next day Oklahoma will know, "Well this person is not there," or "This person is there and I can expect money." And in step 11, we push the orders for the acknowledgements to the state. The orders that they have sent. 

So to summarize, the state creates the orders based on the FEIN that the employer has given us and that I have given to the state. And we pull those and we push the orders to the employer. We pick up the acknowledgments and we push those back to the state. Did anybody have any questions before I move on? Did anybody have any questions about that slide? No? Okay. 

Portal registration, the next slide. Everyone must register. There's a profile form which is very is very straight forward form. And I'll call it, this is a sample of it. And I'm just going to go through it quickly here.

There's an agreement you're looking right at right now. All this basically says is you will handle the Electronic Income Withholding Orders the same manner as you had gotten them on paper. And then you will accept that. And then you provide us with general information about the Company name, your primary or parent FEIN here. Then you go down and you give us address information about the address you used when you report new hire hits. Then the address that you use for the states you want printed Income Withholding Orders to go. Those two addresses help the states identify the records in their system so they can make sure they get all of the employer records identified as being electronic. If they're missing an FEIN in a record or something, these addresses help them. 

In the next section here, the employer gives us their contact information. Both business and technical. If they have a problem with a file or document, or if they have a business process question, we have both of those contacts. And then moving down, the file information. Now the employer tells us, "I want either PDF acknowledgment." We have email notification which I'll get to in just a little bit. And whether you want the files encrypted. The next page is what you're going to need the IT department for. Because here is the server information. We need the IP address or hostname where we're going to drop the orders off and pick the acknowledgements up from. And those are the pick-up and drop-off columns that you see in that thing. And that's the whole profile form, that's it. So we need that. That's why you're going to need to talk to your IT department to get that information so that we can push the orders and fully acknowledge it. And the registration includes that agreement that I just showed you. 

Now the implementation types. The system to system implementation is generally geared for the medium to larger employers. Some of the employers that are on this that are on EIWO are the Department of Defense, ADP - a large payroll processor out in San Dimas California, the United States Postal Service, Ruby Tuesday Restaurants, Meier stores, the larger companies who have IT bandwidth. Now, what happens in this particular, and this is the only option we had in the beginning back in 2004, 2005, and æ06. We offered a flat file or XML schema. And what that meant was that the records have to be, you know, we pick up the information from the states. And we put that in either a flash file or XML format for the employer. We will then send that to the employer. Now what happened then in step two is the mapping. Employers, when you get that filing, you can't read it unless somebody has written a computer program to go in to map all the elements: the obligation amount, name, SSN, you have to map all of those elements from that file to your payroll system, so that it automatically updates the system so that the deductions can take place. We send the Income Withholding Orders for this option in files or batches. And the employer has to write a program to generate the acknowledgement which we pick up and send back to the state. If there are any errors in that we return them in the acknowledgement files to the employer. 

Now in this process, with the system to system, the manual processing is really minimized. Meier Corporation was the first one up on EIWO. And basically when the file comes in from them, this is going to appeal to probably everybody on the phone call, when the file comes in, it's processed by their system, they've done the mapping, done the IT work, the file basically gets uploaded. Except if they run into or if they think they have a couple of exceptions, they have to handle. They think some things are duplicate, triplicate, whatever. Or some other condition that they flagged as an error. They handle those. Other than that, a human doesn't have to look at them. They go right from system to system. So they go right from the state through the federal portal and right on to the employer. But the mapping has to occur. That's a lot of the three to five month effort. The employer also has to create the acknowledgement. That's programming to create the acknowledgement record to let the state know what happened with the Income Withholding Order. Was it accepted or was it rejected? Again the manual processing is really minimized in this process. But, and I'm sure when I do the presentation in front of a live audience, theyÆre all shaking their heads, "That's what I want." Until we get to this last bullet. A three to five month IT project. 

I've had some who are working right now at Home Depot. Home Depot is estimating they'll be up in January. They just started. They started probably in the middle of July. And that's about a five month project for them. Target went up. They took about three to three and a half months. They had more resources dedicated to it. Some of the employers have gone through this and they've had as any organization does, they have other priorities come up and they can't get it done. But it does take three to five months of IT effort to get it done. And all we can tell you, when I did the presentation and we started this and the Department of Defense came up and the Postal Service, everything went great. But when I went to do the APA presentations, a lot of employers came up to me and said, "You know, I really want to that. But, when I go back I don't have three to five months of IT resources sitting back at the company. There is no way I'm going to get even a slice of that to implement this." 

So what we did is we came back and we had a couple of employers that we worked with to come up with what we call the next slide which is the eZ-IWO No Programing Options. And we have two of them. There's option one and option two. Option one we call the PDF version and we call it the "pretty darn fast" because these things get out there quickly and they're easy to complete the acknowledgements and return. And option 2 is called the XLS because the (inaudible) and spreadsheet. And Microsoft calls Excel "XLS" we call it "extreme lightning speed." Now in both of these options you will always receive an image-ready PDF copy of the order. And this is what the order will look like 100% of the time.

This is what you get at 9:40, give or take five or ten minutes, every morning. They will not look different like they do today from different states. This is exactly what it will look like. It will obviously different names, and dates of birth, and obligation amounts, but it will always look like this. And this is the document that you will receive, I'm just scrolling down through here. ItÆs an image-ready PDF copy of the order. Which means that you can copy this, you can electronically file it, you can make... you can email it. You can do anything you want with any other PDF document. This is ready for prime time. A lot of employers that we talk to, especially some staffing agencies, they take a lot of these orders in, they image them, whatever, that step is done for you here. You have, these are image-ready PDF documents. So you will always, both of these options... remember you always get an image-ready PDF copy of the order. And that's what that looks like. 

Now the difference here, and we named the one PDF for pretty darn fast and the other for the extreme lightning speed is the acknowledgement format. Some of the employers that we talk to wanted a more English user-friendly - and that's an overused phrase - a document that they can respond to for the acknowledgement. Others wanted kind of more automated where they could just go down a column and that's the Excel spreadsheet. So in the next slide, I'll show you as I go through this is how... this is exactly the document you will get. 

If you choose the PDF option, if you want to get the orders, and the acknowledgments, and you know, get the orders as a PDF you want to get the acknowledgments as the fillable PDF, this is what you would get. Let's say you had five orders come in on a given day. You would have five of those orders that I just showed you, the PDFs, and you would have five of these that would match one for one. This is actually, this is a test, this is a prefilled acknowledgement that you would get. So all of the information that we have taken, we filled in for the employer. So when you get the acknowledgment, and this is the acknowledgment, if you do know the person. This is obviously a test - Peter Pepperoni. You would just-left click "accept" there. You can click "validate and save" over here. And you're done. That folder has to get saved through the file, or the directory where weÆre going to pick up the acknowledgment from. That's all that you have to do. 

If you know the person, youÆre going to accept it. If you reject the Income Withholding Order you would reject it and then pick a disposition reason code. And we've come up with a handy-dandy little drop down box here where you can select the reason. And there's only a few of them as you can see. If you don't know the person or you've never known the person, you would click "U," "validate and save," and you're done. There is no other data entry required. All that has to be done is that you either left-click "accept" or "reject". And click "validate and save" and make sure that the document gets saved to the file or the folder with the directory that we're going to pick them up from. And then there is other information that you can put in here. Just like on the paper Income Withholding Order that you received today. You can indicate termination of employment information if that person is no longer there. Termination date, the last known address. All of the same information that is on the form today that you get. 

So this is one way that you can complete the acknowledgments and send them back. So again, if you had five orders come in on a day, you had five of those PDFs that I showed you before, and five of these. One for each of the orders that you got. And you will always keep the orders. We never want them back. But we need to have and we require that the acknowledgments get sent back within a few days after the orders arrive at your company or organization. 

This greatly reduces the IT resources required. ThereÆs no mapping, thereÆs no creating an acknowledgement record, the program will do that. You're able to, as you just saw, easily accept or reject the Income Withholding Order and the information is then provided to the states. As we take that prefilled acknowledgment that you indicated "accept" or "reject", we turn that into an acknowledgment record that we send back to Oklahoma and every other state. And again this process handles terminations and lump sums also. You can let the state know when somebody is no longer in your employ, or it was terminated or whatever, you can let the state know. That way they can keep their records up-to-date so they don't keep sending you Income Withholding Orders that you can't do anything with. So that's one option. That's the fillable PDF option. 

Again, you get the order as a PDF and the acknowledgement as a fillable PDF. And this is what the form looks like as a full page. That's just a static page. 

The next option is the XLS - the extreme lightning speed. This again, these have both been in production for well over two years. Again, let's say that you had those five orders come in but you chose to get the acknowledgments in a spreadsheet rather than as a fillable PDF. This is a sample of what you would get. You would see, and let's use three instead of five, three acknowledgements here. You see our friend Peter Pepperoni again from the order there. He is on line three here. And what you would do here... is you see these are all the... and each one of these headings here matches identically to all the fields that are on the fillable PDF. And we've also put helpful little tool tips up here. Like the document action codes so you'll know what they mean. We have a drop-down box for the states in here so you can know exactly what state it is. This is the disposition reason code. Now, in the fillable PDF, let's left-click "accept" or "reject". Here what you do is put in the disposition status code either "A" or "R". And up here you just put your mouse up here and it'll tell you the values and what they mean. And if you left-click on "reject" like we did before with Peter, then you would go over to the disposition reason code and again you'll see the allowable values along with their definitions. So if you don't know the person, up here you would put a "U", and then you will go down columns K and L and you will be able to complete them. Just go down "A" or "R", "A" or "R" and then if you reject them... and there are some cases where if you accept them you can also put a reason code in. But if you reject, then you have to. And then you save the spreadsheet to the folder or the file of the directory that we are going to pick it up from. So then you go through that again. 

There are a lot of fields. Because I have this link, I can show you, there's a lot of other fields. And these are all the other fields that are on that form. And they're on the paper Income Withholding Order today. If he was terminated, his new address, his new employer, if you know it and so on. So you can complete the acknowledgements this way. You can do either way. I will tell you that the experience has shown now that we've had several years of experience using both of these. Employers that have a higher volume... and I'm just going to, the temporary staff and recruitment agencies really like spreadsheets. They like it because they can go right down and do an A or an R. They don't have to open and close PDF every time, you know, that they want to save an acknowledgement. They can just go down the column. Adecco has chosen this option, LE Services has chosen this option. So, you know, a lot of them have chosen that for that reason. 

There's no difference between them, you can choose whatever you want. And, if you start with one and you think, "You know? I really think the fillable PDF is better for me." You can just let me know and we can have you switched over within a day. Or the other way. If you are getting the fillable PDF and you think we are getting too many of these, we can switch you over to the spreadsheet. 

So again, you give us the FEINs, the orders show up the next day at 9:40 along with prefilled acknowledgements. So this really, really has cut down on the IT resources that are needed. You can complete the project with either of these implementation options easily within two to four weeks. Again there is no mapping. There's no programing on your side. ThereÆs just configuration of a server. And again, we provide the acknowledgement information to the state. And the acknowledgements handle the termination, the lump sums, and responding to Income Withholding Orders. 

No Audio: States Using e-IWO: Arizona, California, Colorado, District of Columbia, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Massachusetts, Michigan, Missouri, Nebraska, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, Washington, West Virginia.

Here's the states using the EIWO. And this is right up to date. We just added South Dakota. We have 25 states that are on, representing well over 70% of the child support case load in the country. You'll notice on this list the large states. Florida will be coming up, Arkansas will be coming up. Alabama will be coming up, and Hawaii will be coming up. But we have, you will notice on here, California, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Texas and so on. Oklahoma was early on in the project. Toby and his staff have done a great job with this. But those are the states that are on, so any of those states... when you participate in EIWO, you'll get your orders from them electronically. 

And it does satisfy, especially for employers that have a large volume, but the temporary staff and recruitment agencies, it really does cut down a lot of the paper. So those are the states that are on. We have more coming up. We are always trying to get states on. And we work with the states because I know when I do these calls, employers want states on. When I go to the states they want all the employers on. We're getting there slowly but surely. But we have 25 representing well more than 70% of the case load for the child support around the country.
 
No Audio: Some of the 240+ Employers on e-IWO - Comprising 2,400+ FEINs: Accor of N.A., Adecco, ADP, Costco, DOD, Dollar General, Dollar Tree, Express Professionals, Jack in the Box, KBR, Kelley Services, Meier, Pepsi, Peoplelink, Quest Diagnostics, Ruby Tuesday, Staffmark, Target, Tyson Foods, UPS, USPS, Verizon, Yum! Brands

Here's some of the companies. Now this slide's a little old. There's now almost 280 companies and we have almost 3,000 FEINs. And you know, you recognize some of the names. You know here Target, Tyson Foods and so on. Some of the bigger ones. From Oklahoma, we have more than this but just to mention a few of them. We have Express Professionals. They're doing the system to system because of the volume. We have Integris Health doing the fillable PDF. We have Chesapeake Energy. And we have Sonic Restaurants who is with ADP. There is Express Professionals which is temporary, Integris Health which is a hospital, Chesapeake Energy and Sonic the Restaurants, all using the EIWO process. So, again with the fillable PDF and the spreadsheet, this has really put EIWO within reach with many employers and again you take a look at the list. These are mostly the larger employers who are well known. But again, there a lot of smaller employers that have decided to sign up and join the process. 

No Audio: Daily email Notifications, with a list of things summarized in the email which include: Processing Summary - Total number of records received, Total number of error records, Total number of records forwarded, Total number of files rejected, Total number of batches received; along with Files Sent To Your Organization - IWO details, Acknowledgements, PDF orders, PDF acknowledgements, XLS acknowledgements, Error, Reject.

Improvements on the next slide. We have an email process and error notifications. And on this slide you'll see over on the right-hand side this is now a daily email notification process. And with this process, we put this in about a year ago. Every day when an employer gets files, they will get an email where we pick up acknowledgements, if they put an acknowledgment up, they will get an email that will summarize the activity. For example, for the number of orders they receive, the number of acknowledgements we pick up. You'll see this processing summary, and the files sent to your organization. You'll see that every day you have orders. 

We just put out an employer that does not get many Income Withholding Orders. They went on in the middle of June. They just got their first one and they got an email. And she sent me an email and said, "You know this is great. And now I know. I went out there and got it. I filled the acknowledgements out." Email process is really hitting the mark with that. Letting the employers and the states know about what processing activity occurred during the day. There's enhanced editing on the spreadsheet and the fillable PDF. As I showed you with the spreadsheet and the fillable PDF with the drop-down boxes. And we now have information on the web and I have a new link in this presentation - in fact, it's the first one I'm using it in - which gives employers information right of the Federal OCSE website about the EIWO project and the various implementation options. 

"Ready, set, go!" with the little guy going across there in his car. If you listened closely, you think, "Okay what do I need to do to do this?" You need either an SFTP sever, and this is going to be enough IT acronyms for the entire month for everyone. SFTP server or an FTP server with a Virtual Private Network. Again, you can give this slide to the IT department also. We have to have either and SFTP or the FTP server with a VPN. The reason for that is we have confidential information here. We have SSNs, we have names, we have dates of birth. They were transmitted. We have to make sure that everything is secure. We also use encryptions. But again we have to have an either a SFTP server or a FTP server with a Virtual Private Network. We will help you get set up. We have a few employers that have chosen FTP with a Virtual Private Network. In fact, a Union Pacific Railroad over in Nebraska is one of them and has done this. We will help employers. You know, if you're listening to this and go back and you think they want to do it, get in touch with me. I'll put whoever from your IT department or your networking in touch with our networking department. They can talk and we'll get you set up. It really does, to establish connectivity, it is not too involved and it does not take a lot of effort. If you have an SFTP server I will tell you that you are 90% of the way home with connectivity. This is a piece of cake to implement this. And even with FTP, with a VPN, it's not that much more difficult. 

Okay, the next "Ready, set, go!" slide, if you think, "Yeah, I'd like to do this. How do I get started?" One of the major questions that employers ask is, "How much does this cost me?" And there is no cost for the employer. There is no per transaction fee. There is no sign up fee. There is no recurring fee. There is no cost for the employer. The only investment that the employer has to make is whatever IT or business resources that they devote to implementing the EIWO process. 

There is a profile form that I showed you. And then there's an FEIN spreadsheet. With the profile form you will fill out, letÆs say you had ten FEINs. You would only fill out one profile form with your parent or primary FEIN. And then I provide you with a spreadsheet, where you give me all of your other FEINs. So you give the parent again on that FEIN spreadsheet along with all of your others. That is the key, again, to identification the EIWO. I use that spreadsheet. We put that in our FEIN table, and we pass that on to the states so they can then know and update their records and when you're ready to go, start sending you the orders electronically. 

So once you fill out the profile, you send me the spreadsheet in, and we establish connectivity with you in the third bullet, youÆre within a week or two of going on EIWO. This goes very quickly. Once we establish connectivity, we send you a few tests. You will see Peter Pepperoni, you will see the same exact test cases come to you. And I assume most of the employers on the call will choose one of the no programming options. Either the fillable PDF or the Excel spreadsheet. And we conduct the test, you complete the acknowledgements and send them back. And once you send them back correctly, you're good to go. 

And I'll give you one example: UPS last year went up and they're doing the fillable PDF and they were up in less than a month. And that's UPS. I mean, they're a big company but the volume really doesn't make much difference when establishing connectivity. But they got it done and they were up in less than a month. And then you start to receive them. What happens is I let the states know when we have a call about once a month or every other month with the states and the employers. And I send out, on the 1st and 15th of every month, I let the states know of any new employers that have come up. So that's how Toby and the rest of the states find out, "Oh there's a new employer up. I have to have those FEINs added." And that's what they do. 

Does anybody have any questions before I move on? Okay. The benefits. As you can tell going through this, adding additional employers per state or states per employers is straightforward. The reason that's true is because everything in this process is standard and uniform. I understand that the orders that you get today do not always look the same. One is from Texas will look different from one from Missouri, look different than the one from New York. This process all of the orders look the same because the record layout and all the file formats are identical. It isn't like, "Well, for California we'll have this element added and not for Oklahoma. And for this one we'll have Texas and not for this." Everything is standard and uniform so once you can take an order from a state, you take it from any state because it will always come in in the same format, the same way, 100% of the time. 

It increases collections. The first collection gets to the family an average of two and a half to three weeks earlier than it otherwise would have on paper. Because by the time the Incoming Withholding Order is printed, mailed from the state, sent to the employer, and if it doesn't go directly to the employer, if it goes to a subsidiary or if it goes to another location, it has to get routed back a lot of times. That adds days, weeks, or even months sometimes to get the Income Withholding Order implemented. It really, again, does get the money to the family much, much faster. 

It saves time, money and resources. Employers that have done the system to system have said that it saves them around $6.50 a document. From not having to slip the mail open, read it, data enter all of the information. Again that's the system to system where the system is reading the file and processing it and updating their payroll system. The fillable PDF and spreadsheet, around $5.00 a document because the document comes in, it doesn't have to be opened, it's already, you know, an image-ready PDF. It doesn't have to be scanned. It can be electronically filled in multiple locations. It can be made available to the employees. It saves everyone time, money, and resources. And the employers, you know, that have been on this have proved it time and time again. 

The fourth bullet is something that employers have been asking for, for years and years, as long as I have been in the program, for uniform data from all the states. This is it. As I said, the orders all look the same. So do the acknowledgements. It increases the accuracy and reliability of the data because we are having a system generate this. You're completing it, our system is picking it up and getting it back there. There is no, any human intervention of writing something on a document or something like that. And the acknowledgement provides timely feedback, which helps the state to be able to go to another lead if they know that up this person is not there anymore at Chesapeake or Express Pro, they can look somewhere else. It also helps the employer because by providing that feedback the state now does not have to send you those reminder letters asking you what's the status of the Income Withholding Order or, you know, "When's my money coming?"
 
No Audio: Resources - e-IWO documentation at http://www.acf.hhs.gov/programs/cse/newhire/employer/eiwo/eiwo.htm

The resources. This is the new link I was talking about. This has got information talking about both the system to system and the no programing option out there on the Federal OCSE website. Click on the link, you'll see the page. There's a map showing the states that are up and the states that are developing. You'll see a little user guide that we have come up with for the no programing option. It's about a 15-page document. You'll see the profile form that you'll have to complete there. Then if you take a look at that and you think you'll want to do this and you take a look and you say "yep." You've talked to your IT department and your company. "I think I want to do this," whatever. After you take a look at that page and you decide on an option or you have questions on it, give me a call. Or send me an email and we'll set up a short call. We do that all of the time with employers. It's invaluable. A five minute phone call can save 20 emails. Trust me. Just pick up the phone, give me a call. Or we'll set up a call and discuss it with you. The IT department or whatever to get you set up. 

We have a work group that, like I said, meets every month. Every other month during the summer time. And we have a workplace. Most of that information is now on the Federal OSCE website and in this documentation link that I just showed you. So we have lots of the information for the employers to take a look at now about the EIWO. 

So in summary, patterned after the "Eat this, not that" books, manuals and pamphlets. EIWO do this with a computer rather than with the poor person on the right there you can see carrying all of the Income Withholding Orders from one location in the office to the other. So, that is the presentation.

No Audio: Questions & Answers. Contact Information: Bill Stuart, william.stuart@acy.hhs.gov, (518) 399 - 9241
 
If there are any questions or answers, thereÆs my email address, phone number, which I think is everywhere. (laughs) Everywhere! I get a lot of emails and a lot of phone calls but that's what we want. We want more employers to participate. So, Toby, are there any questions or... 

Toby Hallows: Bill, the only question weÆve gotten to this point is to have your phone number, which of course you provided on the last slide. So haven't gotten any questions in on the actual instant messaging. Does anybody have any questions for Bill? Oh my goodness, wow. That means that Bill has finally done a presentation where everybody understands everything perfectly. 

Bill Stuart: (laughs) Yeah. 

Toby Hallows: Oh, we got a question. "Bill, how are the employees notified?" 

Bill Stuart: The employees are notified in a variety of ways. Some of the employers make the Income Withholding Order, the electronic one they get, the image-ready PDF, available to the employee. They either have a site where they can do that. Some of them still print that document and have to mail it to them. They have no other way to get it to them. But it's still, they print it and give it to the employee. But several employers have now gone to an electronic system where the employee can access a website with a secure pass. You know, a username and password so they can view them. I know the Department of Defense does that. I know several large employers do that. So they can let the employee know, "Hey weÆve got a document in." Not just Income Withholding Orders, this relates to whether the information they get about the employee from IRS or from SSA or something like that. It's the same way you would but there are few more options because again the order comes in as an image-ready PDF. 

Toby Hallows: Alright... does anybody else? And feel free at this point to go ahead and take your phones off mute, and ask your questions over the phone line if you would like. Or you can type it. We'll do it either way. We have another question. Karen Whitehead would like to know, "Bill, how does this benefit small businesses?" 

Bill Stuart: This saves a lot of time. One, the order comes in the next day and comes in electronically. There's no filing. You don't have to file any of the paper... You know, you don't have to put it in folders and so on and so forth. Everything is electronic, or "green." It saves the small business the paper and the time of having to get that and they'll process it. So, with the Income Withholding Orders yes, you have to go through and you get the order and you still have to update your payroll system but everything has gotten to you much more quickly and it's come in in a fashion... Now I can't tell you how much employers really, really like getting the orders in image-ready PDFs. That cuts out a lot of steps for small businesses included. Right now copy them, file them, print them, whatever. And they do not have to go through that because again this document is ready to go. If you have very, very, very few Income Withholding Orders, I don't know. I mean... it depends. Obviously the more you have the more you save but we do have employers who only get a few, a month or a quarter that they signed up for, they like it and they keep doing it. 

Toby Hallows: Bill I'll go ahead and add on... Karen I think one of the other things that appeals to people is, you know, the green factor. Being able to cut out the paper. It is you know from a standpoint of it may not benefit you directly but it benefits the environment in that in Oklahoma if you get an Income Withholding Order that's... we're talking about six pages of paper. And that is six more pages of paper that we don't have to send out and you and the employer don't have to store. 

We'll go ahead and officially end the presentation at this point. We do want to thank Bill for his presentation today. Like I said, Bill is always available. Every employer that IÆve ever talked to that has met with Bill or talked with Bill just loves the fact of how available he is. Also here in the state, OKESC Marketing team, or myself will be more than happy to talk to you at any time about the same thing. And we will help you as much as possible. When we can't, we'll just turn it over to Bill anyway. So thank you everyone, and have a wonderful day.