Mutual customer and child matching with Child Support 277-51150000

The Indexing Manager Facility consists of a number of External Customer Matching (ECM) screens used to identify and link mutual customers for the purposes of customer data exchange between Centrelink and external agencies.

Child Support initiate data match requests when a new child support assessment is lodged and payer, payee and child details have been recorded. If the data match request fails to get a Centrelink match, a new data match request is sent on a daily basis for the first month. After that, a data match request is sent monthly (or when person details are updated) until a match occurs.

When a successful match has occurred, data is exchanged between Centrelink and Child Support. The exchanges of data is to make sure:

• customers receive the correct:
• Family Tax Benefit (FTB) Part A rate
• child support entitlement are correct
• care used in the assessment is aligned

Child matching between Centrelink and Child Support is attempted automatically once the child support receiving parent has been successfully matched. An attempt is made to match all children linked to the receiving parent and their current partner with a child support child. Child Support Unit (CSU) staff manually match any unmatched children.

A link is established when the child support child's personal and address details is matched to a mutual Centrelink child/customer through automatic matching. If a link is not established, the Child Support customer identification number (CIN) is automatically recorded on the Centrelink customer's record.

Unclear and multiple match records are stored in the National Index and made available for manual indexing through the Index Manager Facility suite of screens.

If a child is not matched but the receiving parent has been matched, the total child support entitlement from the paying parent will still be loaded onto the customer's record. Separate entitlement and maintenance action details for the child will not be updated but will be stored until a match is made.

Child identity matching was done on the Maintenance Match Child (MNMC) screen on customer records. This screen is no longer, but still displays details of matched and unmatched children. If one of these children needs to be unlinked, the case must be referred to mySupport.

Improved matching means some existing matched customers will fail authentication when data is exchanged. If this occurs, a Manual Follow-up (MFU) will be created to correct the relevant details.

Child Support Unit (CSU) staff:

• manual intervention if an unclear or multiple match/matches occur/s to enable a correct match
• manually match the payee, payer or child if a mismatch occurs

If Child Support information has failed to load onto the customer's record, a mismatch could be preventing details from transferring. For example customer applied for a child support assessment 42 days ago and no entitlement details exist.

If details for a paying parent do not match with details held by Child Support, an activity will create on the customer's record with one of the following explanations:

• paying parent manual matching required (a mismatch has occurred)
• parentage recorded as cannot be proven but paying parent provided by Child Support
• parentage recorded as unknown but paying parent provided by Child Support
• Child Support paying parent is recorded as current partner