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GAO-03-210 Welfare Reform
(the required rate) to 0 in 31 states. These lower participation rate
requirements gave states more flexibility in exempting TANF recipients
considered hard to employ from meeting work requirements. We found
that while almost all states met or exceeded their adjusted required rate in
that year, the federal participation rates that states actually achieved
before adjustment ranged from about 6 percent to more than 70 percent.
Regarding time limits, we found that states generally excluded from time
limits families with a parent or caretaker with a disability or caring for a
family member with a disability. States could do this by using the
20-percent federal time limit extension established in the law or by using
state maintenance of effort funds, as also allowed by the law.
3
Our work
also showed that most families had not yet reached their federal or state-
imposed cash assistance time limit as of fall 2001.
While recipients with impairments may sometimes be exempted from
work requirements and time limits, they may be at risk of having their
benefits reduced or terminated through sanctions. A study in four urban
areas conducted by the Manpower Demonstration Research Corporation
(MDRC) found that recipients with a greater number of health problems
were more likely to be sanctioned for noncompliance with program
requirements than their healthier counterparts.
4
Over 50 percent of former
recipients with at least one health problem left welfare due to sanctions
compared with 39 percent of recipients without health problems. Our
earlier report on sanctions under the TANF program found that families
who left welfare due to sanctions relied on support from family and
friends after TANF payments stopped, rather than on income from
employment, to a greater extent than families who left the program for
other reasons.
5
TANF often serves, as did AFDC, as a temporary stopping point for low-
income individuals with physical or mental impairments that may be
3
A state may exempt up to 20 percent of its average monthly caseload for hardship or
having been subjected to domestic violence.
4
Denise F. Polit, Andrew S. London, and John M. Martinez, The Health of Poor Urban
Women: Findings from the Project on Devolution and Urban Change
, (New York:
Manpower Demonstration Research Corporation, 2001).
5
U.S. General Accounting Office, Welfare Reform: State Sanction Policies and Number of
Families Affected
The Relationship between
TANF and SSI
Convention