Statement of Brendan Lynch, Community Legal Services, Inc., Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

TANF Time Limits: TANF Clients Need More Than Five Years Of Assistance

The experience of poor people in Pennsylvania under Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF) offers a sobering reminder of the potential pitfalls of an absolute five-year time limit for federally-funded welfare. The Pennsylvania Department of Public Welfare (DPW) implemented TANF on March 3, 1997, so that parents who received TANF benefits continuously since that time have recently begun exhausting their eligibility; thousands of parents will reach the five-year limit within the next twelve months. Pennsylvania’s TANF parents have not yet experienced the after-effects of the lifetime limit under TANF, because the state has extended the deadline for time-limit terminations until this summer. The difficulties and setbacks encountered by so many recipients in their first five years demonstrate, however, that a strict time limit is an unrealistic expectation for a large portion of the caseload.

Community Legal Services of Philadelphia, Inc. (CLS) works with low-income Philadelphia clients on a variety of problems, including public benefits. We represent and advise many TANF parents, and we work closely with community organizations that also reach out to low-income parents. Our experience has shown that parents in many different categories have serious barriers to self-sufficiency which cannot reasonably be resolved within five years. These TANF parents fall into two general groups: people who have long-term barriers to work, and workers who remain so poor that they receive a partial TANF grant. Although federal law permits states to exempt 20% of the caseload from the time limit, our research shows that this exemption is far too narrow; parents with serious barriers to self-sufficiency constitute a large portion of the caseload. Moreover, with a strong economy and new work incentives, people who are able to work have left welfare, and so the entire caseload at any given time has a higher proportion than formerly of parents who are unable to work. Long-term TANF recipients are much more likely to face serious barriers, and to need assistance beyond five years.

1. Many TANF clients have serious, long-term barriers to work.

a. Disabilities or other personal barriers that prevent clients from keeping a job

Many TANF clients in Pennsylvania have disabilities that do not rise to the level of the Social Security disability standard, so that the clients do not qualify for Supplemental Security Income (SSI) payments. These disabilities nevertheless present an imposing obstacle to economic independence. Some clients have physical ailments; others suffer from low-level mental illness; many have a combination of afflictions, often compounded by self-medication through drugs and alcohol. These clients usually have great difficulty in finding work, and when they do find a job, they frequently cannot maintain it.

The Pennsylvania Department of Public Welfare (DPW) has contracted with a number of organizations to perform outreach to clients who have difficulty complying with the department’s requirements. One of these, Women’s Association for Women’s Alternatives, Inc. (WAWA), deals with approximately 140 clients in Philadelphia. All 140 have been found to be medically exempt from the work requirement by DPW, and WAWA sends case workers out to their homes to conduct detailed discussions about clients’ problems and obstacles to self-sufficiency.

Many of the exempt clients referred to an outreach program are so severely disabled that they will eventually qualify for SSI, which will remove them from the welfare caseload. Others, though, will never be able to obtain SSI. Patty McGlone, a case manager at WAWA, estimates that 30% of her organization’s clients do not meet the SSI disability standard, even though DPW has found that they are unable to meet the TANF work requirement. This group of clients suffers from a range of disabilities, but either have been turned down for SSI or are unlikely to qualify for it within the next five years. Some WAWA clients have been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder; others experience agoraphobia or panic attacks. Still other clients have back problems or arthritis, or are HIV-positive and feeling symptoms of full-blown AIDS.

One TANF parent, D.D., is a 42 year old woman with two children who has been trying to find appropriate work for the past five years. She has been receiving TANF since March 1997, but the welfare office has not helped her to find a job that she can keep. She suffers from phlebitis, which causes severe pain without warning; her leg will become swelled and force her to rest, and on some days she cannot get out of bed at all. Extensive standing, walking, or other physical activity exacerbates the problem. D.D. is very unlikely to qualify for SSI based solely on phlebitis, but her condition is, nevertheless, a constant hindrance in her job search. She worked as a clerk for the Liquor Control Board for six months in 1997, for $6.00/hour, but she was forced to quit because the job involved cleaning and lifting boxes, and she was physically unable to perform the job’s requirements. Since then, she has been searching for an entirely sedentary clerical job, but she is further hindered by her lack of a high school degree.

D.D. describes herself as a "go-getter", but her body limits the ways in which she can support her children. In 2001, she took the civil service exam as a clerk/typist, and she passed, but most recently she was #577 on the waiting list. Should her name come up, she will likely be further hindered by her lack of a General Equivalency Degree. D.D. is not considered exempt from the TANF work requirement by DPW, and so she has had to look for work, and attend job readiness programs, rather than focus on a program which would enable her to earn her G.E.D. and improve her chances of finding a clerical job. If she does find an appropriate job, she will need a sympathetic boss who will grant her accommodations on days when she is unable to come to work. D.D. emphasizes that she is ready and willing to work to support her children, but after five years on TANF, despite her steady efforts to find work, she still does not have the education, the networking skills, or the medical support that would enable her to leave the welfare rolls.

A substantial proportion of our clients also face an array of other barriers which are virtually impossible to cure or fix within sixty months, especially while also meeting a work requirement. Some are illiterate, and thus cannot even fill out a job application, let alone perform the tasks required in most jobs. Learning to read and write, when one has been out of school for years, is a very difficult task, and usually must be accomplished before a parent can then go on to complete job training or job readiness programs; many TANF parents cannot do both within five years. The challenge becomes insuperable when illiterate clients must meet a work requirement, yet literacy education does not qualify as a work activity.

Many other clients are immigrants or refugees who cannot speak English, and whose language barrier is compounded by an additional problem. Some are refugees from war zones, such as Cambodia or Ethiopia, who exhibit symptoms of post traumatic stress disorder. Others suffer from clinical depression, and have great difficulty finding adequate medical and psychological care in their native language, let alone a class in English for Speakers of Other Languages. For non-English-speaking TANF recipients who suffer disabilities, the only available jobs are often housekeeping or other physical tasks which do not require speaking, but which they cannot perform due to their physical limitations - if, after years out of school, they cannot become proficient in English, then almost no appropriate work is open to them.

b. Serious household problems that prevent clients from finding work

Many CLS clients have family members with full-time, all-consuming needs, such as paralyzed or incapacitated children, or elderly parents with schizophrenia or Alzheimer’s. Disabled dependents present single TANF parents with overwhelming challenges, and it is simply unrealistic to expect that in less than sixty months, these parents will be prepared to leave their families at home. Disabled dependents typically require a caregiver to administer medications, monitor breathing, perform bathing and feeding, assist with stretching and physical therapy, stand ready for emergencies, and take them to all appointments, and full-time nurses are extremely expensive and often unavailable to low-income clients.

Equally exhausting for many parents is the strain of arranging all of the necessary services and dealing with inevitable breakdowns in the support structure. Even parents who have obtained nursing care must try to track down a replacement on the many occasions when low-paid nurses fail to show up for their shift, and in the meantime the parent must stay home and perform all of the nurse’s tasks. If the patient’s health insurer denies approval of a medication, the burden falls squarely on the parent to contact the insurer, find out the reasons for the denial pressure the prescribing doctor’s office to provide the necessary paperwork, and, in some cases, file a grievance and negotiate directly with the insurer about whether the medication will be approved. Each of these tasks frustrates able-bodied people when the occasional injury or illness temporarily becomes a problem; for parents with seriously disabled dependents, these tasks crop up almost constantly, with multiple providers serving the patient at all times.

One CLS client, D.B., has four children with serious disabilities, and a fifth child for whom she has filed an SSI application. She found work on her own, at a paratransit company, but she continually had to leave work for a medical emergency with one of her children, and ultimately had to quit the job. When D.B. has been able to find child care providers, they have not lasted long, because they were quickly overwhelmed by the childrens’ needs, especially one daughter’s bad asthma attacks.

c. Clients who cannot access the services they need

Aside from the several groups of TANF recipients who are not able to achieve independence, there are many others who could find work and, perhaps, become financially independent if they were able to access employment support services that are ostensibly available to them. In our experience, however, the image of a perfect support system for TANF clients is a fantasy. Breakdowns in the system for needy people are closer to the norm than the exception. Any welfare law which presumes that all clients will receive all the necessary preparation for economic self-sufficiency within some fraction of five years rests upon a fundamental misconception about the actual lives of welfare recipients.

In the experience of clients at CLS and related organizations, navigating the welfare system requires a complicated, time-consuming series of applications, referrals, trips to track down documents, reapplications, false starts, rejections, unanswered phones, and, ultimately, attempts to comply with an array of obligations from employer, training program, and case worker. Due to the nature of large bureaucracies with extensive client populations, with the huge potential for human or computer error, a substantial proportion of TANF clients find that, in welfare offices or training programs, phone calls are not returned, verification forms are lost, and requests for extensions or accommodations are improperly rejected.

Of course, most working TANF clients are not frustrated at every opportunity, but only a small handful of things need go wrong before a client has been forced to withdraw from a training program, and even if these clients are eventually able to re-enroll, their TANF ‘clock’ will not stop ticking, as they move closer to their five-year limit without having made any progress towards employment. Other clients belong in a different assistance program, such as SSI, but their difficulty navigating the system of applications, hearings, and appeals often results in lengthy TANF stays while waiting to be approved for SSI, and these clients risk termination of any public assistance without ever receiving benefits to which they are entitled.

One CLS client, D.G., was on TANF for over four years and applied for SSI three times, but was turned down each time. She did not realize that she had the option of filing an appeal - she has extremely limited reading skills - and in any event, she was in no position to pursue an appeal by herself. DPW was not able to help D.G. get onto SSI, and she was beginning to approach her five-year lifetime limit when CLS won her SSI case. D.G. met the disability standard for SSI eligibility all along, but she was very nearly cut off of public assistance altogether due to her cognitive disability - the very reason for which she qualified for SSI.

Patty McGlone, the WAWA case manager, reports that of the 140 clients in her office, approximately 100 ought to qualify for SSI, and thus leave the welfare rolls, but even five full years into TANF, none of them have yet been approved for SSI, for a variety of reasons. Some WAWA clients, or their family members or advocates, were simply never alerted to which programs or offices were available to assist them, or were not informed how appropriate referrals to organizations such as WAWA should be made. Others seeking help with an SSI application from DPW were improperly turned away; amazingly, one client was turned down despite being comatose; his caseworker was told that the man would first have to apply on his own.

Glitches in welfare administration are not limited to SSI applications. One client, who asked that she not be identified, was able to enroll in a four-week class in Philadelphia in July 2001, and the welfare office agreed to pay her tuition. Shortly after the class started, however, she had to miss three days when her son became ill with a severe asthma attack. She understood that she had missed too much of the class and would not be able to return, but was hoping to enroll in a later session and complete the class. Instead, DPW threatened sanctions, prepared to charge her for the class’s cost, and demanded proof of her son’s condition. Since she had remained home with her son, believing it was best that she be with him there, she could not produce a doctor’s bill or hospital chart, although his attack was typical of what asthmatics frequently suffer. In the end, with our intervention, she avoided a large overpayment, but while dealing with DPW, she was unable to re-enroll in the class. Ideally, her word, and evidence of the boy’s ongoing condition and of her genuine desire to finish the class, would have been accepted, and she would have signed up for a class session in the late summer or fall; instead, many months later, in March 2002, she was finally able to enroll in an entirely different class.

The Pittsburgh City Paper reports that Carlene Poole, a TANF recipient since March 1997 with a diagnosed learning disability and a fifth-grade reading level, enrolled in at least six job readiness, job training, and remedial education programs, but found that the programs offered training that was too job-specific, and didn’t address basic literacy or learning disabilities . Poole reported "humiliating experiences" in trying to fill out job applications. Finally, DPW allowed her to seek literacy training, but she only completed one year; although she found a program that addressed her most basic needs, she says, she was unable to get further state funding for her classes. Now, having taking some word processing training, she is seeking clerical work, but she wonders: "what if when I get there my spelling and stuff is not good enough?"¹

TANF clients must also deal with routine problems with support services which are outside the domain of the state welfare bureaucracy, but which are equally critical to clients’ ability to pursue full-time work in the private economy. D.D., the client discussed above who is unable to maintain a job due to phlebitis and the lack of a G.E.D., has had trouble with private employers, health care providers, and the state welfare agency. She has probably never been treated properly for her phlebitis, because she has not had a regular relationship with a primary care doctor. Her medical coverage has been irregular, and in 2001 she was cut off of cash and medical benefits for six months. She currently goes to a free public health center for checkups and treatment; and she appreciates their help, but it is difficult to see them - although she needed an appointment in February 2002, the next available appointment was in May.

Irregular medical care has limited D.D.’s ability to obtain a G.E.D. and find clerical work. DPW referred her to a program in which she could obtain job training while also obtaining her G.E.D., but on the second day of the program, her phlebitis acted up and she could not get out of bed, let alone attend the program, due to the extreme pain. D.D. wants to attend the program and is hoping to go back, but the program directors are demanding an explanation for her absence on the second day, and she cannot re-enroll until she provides satisfactory proof. Naturally, she tried to obtain proof of her problems with phlebitis, but she cannot see a doctor before May, by which point her program slot will be moot. Eventually, she may be ready to re-enroll, but by the time D.D. obtains her G.E.D., her sixty months on TANF will have long since run out.

The interaction of multiple problems in D.D.’s case is typical of many we have witnessed at CLS. D.D. did just what the welfare department asked her to do: she took charge of her job search, found a job as a clerk, put in lots of other job applications, took the civil service exam, enrolled in a job training program, and tried to see a doctor and get medical documentation when requested by the program. It is possible, though far from certain, that she could have obtained a full-time job by now, with the potential for raises and promotions, if she had been placed in a high-quality G.E.D. program at the outset of her time on TANF, if she had had regular medical coverage and a steady relationship with a doctor who could provide ongoing treatment for phlebitis and proof of her illness for employers, and if she had been placed in a good job training and placement program which helped line up appropriate clerical positions with sympathetic employers. Instead, D.D. encountered frustration, denials, and inappropriate job offers.

D.D.’s case illustrates why five years is simply too brief for so many TANF clients: in the real world, support services aren’t always available, training programs aren’t always receptive, the right job - even during a boom economy - isn’t always hiring, and clients who appear work-ready on paper don’t always have the ability, or the credentials, to move into full-time employment until the right supports and jobs are available.

Other clients need even greater support than D.D., but receive only incompetent, uncaring, or simply uninformed responses. Most clients with drug or alcohol dependencies need inpatient treatment at a high-quality residential facility, but the managed care organizations that operate the Medicaid system in the Philadelphia area will only approve a few hours a week for outpatient visits. A significant proportion of clients at CLS and WAWA have some form of mental illness, but the majority of mentally ill clients are not receiving intensive mental health treatment; some of them can do little better than visiting the doctor down the street from them, who prescribes medications despite no specific training in psychiatry, and does not provide a referral to a specialist. Others are referred to therapists, but discover that the therapists are either unable or unwilling to provide treatment, despite a formal diagnosis of mental illness.

A lack of English proficiency is a serious barrier to employment for many immigrants, refugees, and others, including many Puerto Ricans. Unfortunately, DPW does not fund classes in English for Speakers of Other Languages, and the programs that are open to poor clients are of very low quality. Most ESL classes only offer instruction for three to five hours per week, which is not very useful, and is too slow a rate for people who are expected to be ensconced in middle-class employment in a year or two. We have also found that ESL classes presume that the student is literate in their native language, but many immigrants and refugees are illiterate even in their native languages. Moreover, many ESL classes evaluate their students’ abilities improperly, and then provide only volunteer teachers without training in adult literacy education.

2. Many TANF clients do work, but do not earn enough to escape sub-poverty.

In addition to the TANF clients who are unable to work, CLS has worked with many others who exemplify the ideal TANF client under the ‘work first’ philosophy embodied in the TANF Act and Pennsylvania’s own welfare reform law: they can, and do, seek work, and they strive to stay in their jobs once they have found them. The media have relayed the stories of some such clients who have found jobs, earned promotions and raises, and achieved financial independence. Less attention has been paid, however, to the thousands of other recipients who try to maintain jobs but are unable to, or who stay in jobs and work programs for long stretches and still make so little that they remain on the welfare rolls. A close look at the data suggests that those Pennsylvania welfare recipients who were able to work were leaving the rolls without encouragement from TANF work rules, and that their less employable neighbors will need more time than five years to prepare to follow them into full-time work at a sustainable wage.

Evidence in Pennsylvania suggests that the strong economy, rather than the work rules, time limits, and incentives of TANF, was the primary reason for the dramatic decline in the caseload over the past several years. According to DPW’s own figures, the rate of decline in Pennsylvania’s TANF caseload increased only slightly in the year after implementation of TANF in March 1997, and it has slowed sharply since then. The caseload declined by 13.4% from March 1996 through March 1997, well before any AFDC client had heard about future welfare reform. In the following year, through March 1998, the caseload dropped by 15.4%. If TANF rules were primarily responsible for the drop in the welfare population, then in subsequent years, as DPW called more people into the welfare district offices for meetings to discuss the new time limits and obligations, and older recipients took advantages of increased incentives, the rate of decline should have increased. Instead, the statewide caseload only declined by 12.2% between March 1998 and March 1999. The state did not begin to require that nonexempt recipients work for twenty hours per week - the heart of the TANF program - until after March 1999, since the work requirement only applied after the first twenty-four months of benefits, but the number of people leaving the welfare rolls slowed dramatically after the work requirement was imposed: the caseload dropped by 8.8% in the twelve months ending in March 2000; and by just 4.4% between March 2000 and March 2001. As the five-year time limit approaches for the first cohort of recipients, the caseload is actually increasing - it rose by two-tenths of a percent between March 2001 and January 2002. Overall, in the three years between March 1996 and March 1999, Pennsylvania’s TANF caseload declined by a total of 40%; in the almost three years since March 1999, when the work requirement was imposed, the caseload has only declined an additional 13% from the level of March 1996.

The data reflect our experience here at CLS: some clients leave welfare for work when the economy is strong and they can find work commensurate with their education and skills, but in an economic downturn, fewer of them can find such jobs. These clients were already leaving the welfare rolls in January 1996, and the work requirement probably had very little effect on them. Many other clients, meanwhile, do not have the skills, education, physical and mental abilities, or support structures and resources to find and keep jobs that will keep them out of sub-poverty. Some of them, with long-term disabilities or other barriers, have not found jobs in five years, because full-time work is simply not possible, and no threatened cutoff of cash is a relevant incentive. Another group of clients has tried to find work, but have either found such low wages or few hours that they still qualify for a partial TANF grant, with incomes 33% below the federal poverty level, or else have not been able to find work at all, despite their cooperation with work and training programs.

Teresa Battle, a CLS client, has had an all-too-common experience. She is eager to work, and she has a high school diploma, but she has been forced to raise three children by herself, including a son with major depression and attention deficit-hyperactive disorder. She has sought training, and has completed every activity to which she was assigned, even seeking work when she could have just gone through the motions as volunteer program. Nonetheless, she finds herself just a year away from her lifetime limit and unable to get a job.

Starting in August 1999, Battle completed a full six-month program of paid work experience in Philadelphia. Unfortunately, though she had been told that she would receive training as a security guard, the work consisted of receptionist’s tasks, which she was not able to benefit from, because they involved typing and computer skills in which she had not been trained. When she completed the program in February 2000, she began sending out job applications, but she had great difficulty finding an appropriate job, because with her skills, jobs during the day were hard to come by, and she could not find anyone willing to provide child care for her three children during an overnight shift. She decided to enter the military, so she left TANF and enlisted in the service in June 2000, but her son’s condition worsened, and she was forced to leave the service in March 2001, with an honorable discharge, when he was hospitalized, and then was placed in a outpatient program requiring daily treatment.

Since March 2001, when Battle reapplied for TANF, she has sought more work experience at the Transitional Work Corporation, but she has been turned down because DPW imposes a six-month lifetime limit on participation in paid work experience. As a result, in order to receive benefits, she has had to perform unpaid community service and pursue an independent job search; she has continued to file job applications, but reports that jobs are currently scarce. Battle has taught herself to type, but she finds that employers want people who are familiar with Excel, mail merge, and other more advanced computer functions; ironically, T.W.C. offers training in those functions, but she cannot get into the program. Thus, despite serving her country, performing work experience and requesting more, teaching herself to type, and performing everything asked of her by the welfare department, Battle cannot find a job that will enable her to earn enough to support a household of four, while leaving enough time to care for her disabled son and his two young siblings.

Another woman, who contacted Congreso de Latinos Unidos and asked that her story be used to publicize the darker side of welfare reform, found work at a dress store. She stayed with the job, despite several children to care for, and she worked her way up to assistant manager, but her wages were still so low that her family still qualified for a partial TANF grant. Her experience has been all too common in Pennsylvania. The Maternity Care Coalition (MCC), a Philadelphia organization that provides health education, nutrition, and other family support to low-income mothers, most of whom receive TANF, has found that many "low-income families who are trying to transition from welfare to work... lack the requisite skills and work experience for employment at a family-sustaining wage." The MCC concludes that "TANF should allow for low wages plus cash benefits to "not be counted" against the 5-year time limit."

3. A high proportion of the caseload has serious barriers to self-sufficiency.

DPW’s research on the TANF population in Pennsylvania demonstrates that two general groups, sub-poverty workers and people with long-term barriers to work, add up to well more than 20% of the caseload. As more work-ready people leave the rolls, this percentage is likely to increase, since barriers are disproportionately concentrated among people who stay on TANF long term and approach their lifetime limit. In the future, as people who cannot get off of TANF are joined by people who left briefly but could not remain off, this group of long-term recipients will constitute a higher and higher proportion of total caseload.

Last year, DPW compiled a detailed demographic chart of the adults on the TANF rolls as of March 3, 2001. At that point, 60,027 total parents receiving TANF. (As of December 2001, there were 59,893 parents, and the caseload was rising, so these figures are likely a very accurate summary of the current TANF population.) DPW’s March 3, 2001 demographic chart shows that parents with barriers to self-sufficiency are a very large segment of the total caseload, and well over one-fifth from any perspective. It also demonstrates that these barriers are heavily concentrated among the long-term clients in the "June 2002 cohort" - the group of parents who were on schedule to be the first to use up their five-year lifetime TANF eligibility, between March 3, 2002 and June 30, 2002. There were 12,112 total parents in the June 2002 cohort.

For example, disabilities and other recognized barriers to work were prevalent among far more than one-fifth of the caseload. DPW granted exceptions to the work requirements for disabilities, caring for infants, unavailability of child care, or other good cause to a total of 19,645 parents, or 33% or caseload. In the June 2002 cohort, the proportion of recipients whom DPW determined were unable to work was even higher: 40%, or 4801 adults.

DPW’s demographic chart also shows that, as of March 3, 2001, a substantial number of recipients were working, just as they were expected to, yet were not off the TANF rolls, because their income was so low that they still qualified for a partial grant. Specifically, 4,911 adults, or 8.2% of caseload, were working 25 hours per week or more. Of the June 2002 cohort, 12% (or 1,456 parents) were working 25 hours/week or more and still on TANF. Faced with the loss of their benefits in just a year, these parents worked more than DPW required, yet they still could not achieve an income that would allow them to support their families independently. An additional 15% (9,066 adults) of the total caseload worked up to 25 hours/week, for total of 23% of the overall caseload who were working 20 hours/week or more. Of the June 2002 cohort, an additional 21% worked up to 25 hours/week, for a total of 33% of the June 2002 cohort who were working and yet still mired in sub-poverty.

DPW’s chart shows that 18,983 adults, or 32% of entire caseload, had large families with three or more kids. Of those in the June 2002 cohort, however, 48% had such large families. Thus, these larger families have had a harder time getting off of TANF, and another DPW study shows that when they do leave TANF, they remain closer in danger of falling back onto it. "Welfare Reform After Three Years," which surveyed parents who left TANF through 1999, shows that such families typically stayed below poverty, even when they found work, and even before the recession began. Only 24% of TANF leavers had households with four or more people - far less than the proportion of large households among those that remained on TANF, and half the percentage in the June 2002 cohort. In 2001, the federal poverty level was $17,652 for a family of four, yet three full years after leaving TANF, the average earnings of all former recipients was only about $14,000, keeping the typical former TANF family with three children well below the poverty line.

DPW’s TANF Caseload and Activities (C&A) Report for October 2001 confirms the high percentage of clients facing obstacles to self-sufficiency. Out of 58,660 parents on TANF, 18,697, or 32%, were currently exempt from the work requirement, due to disability, lack of child care, or other good cause (excluding domestic violence). Of those, 11,759 alone, or 20% of the caseload, had a disability that prevented them from working. Another 12,312 parents, or 21%, were employed, yet were still so far below the poverty level that they qualified for a partial TANF grant. In all, 53% of active TANF parents in October 2001 were either certified unable to work, or else were working but receiving a partial grant.

For an additional 17,452 parents in October 2001, the CAO was investigating or sanctioning them, or pursuing compliance, or pursuing conciliation or an appeal. It is extremely likely that these parents, who were failing to meet the department’s requirements, were experiencing a high incidence of hidden barriers, such as undiagnosed learning disabilities, mental illness, or illiteracy.²

4. Conclusion

DPW acknowledges that many recipients must have assistance beyond five years, and it will establish an Extended TANF program, wherein all clients who are beyond five years can receive continued benefits so long as they comply with one of two programs. People who can work will be assigned to work activities through Work Plus, while non-work-ready parents will be connected with therapy and other services to help them overcome their barriers in the Maximizing Participation Project. DPW also recognizes that a high number of parents fall into one of those two groups: all parents who need it, rather than just 20% of the caseload, will be eligible for Extended TANF. At present, however, the state is faced with the need to fund Extended TANF with state dollars. As Congress reauthorizes TANF, we hope it will encourage the efforts of Pennsylvania and other states to continue working with parents who need more help to become self-sufficient. Congress should allow states the flexibility to remove the time limit for all recipients who have barriers to self-sufficiency.

1 Julie Mickens, Clock Watching: No fare-thee-well yet for welfare clients at the state’s five-year benefits cutoff, but are state promises too good to be true, Pittsburgh City Paper, Jan. 30, 2002, available online at http://www.pghcitypaper.com/nz13002.html.

2 Using Census Bureau data from 1999, the General Accounting Office reported last fall that 44% of TANF recipients - three times the rate of non-TANF families - reported physical or mental impairments. This figure did not even include addiction or domestic violence. GAO, Welfare Reform: More Coordinated Federal Effort could help States and Localities Move TANF Recipients with Impairments Toward Employment at 3 and n.3 (October 2001) (GAO-02-37).