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3 The Federal-State Cooperative Relationship
Pages 35-48

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From page 35...
... Accordingly, mechanisms for cooperation and coordination between federal statistical agencies and state or local authorities are common in the statistical system, ranging from relatively simple awareness-building activities (e.g., the multitude of shortterm partnerships that the Census Bureau forges to boost participation in the decennial census) to highly structured contractual and financial agreements (e.g., the grants administered by the Bureau of Justice Statistics to support development of criminal history record databases)
From page 36...
... (Schwartz observed that, at one time, registration districts were more city based and, in fact, New York City began as a registration area before New York state.) Each of the 57 registration jurisdictions reports data directly to NCHS through the VSCP Schwartz also noted another centralizing force in the .
From page 37...
... Schwartz noted that there is a constant tension in resource allocation between the statistical role and the civil registration and customer service role and that the statistical side must take second place. Yet a third and no less important role has arisen and been made explicit in law in recent years: vital records offices are also front lines in national security efforts.
From page 38...
... noted another way in which the security role potentially clashes with the data collection role. He worried that, to the extent that electronic vital registration systems become portrayed as a homeland security tool or even a type of law enforcement mechanism for detecting fraud, complications may arise for statistics.
From page 39...
... Reporting lags and data quality or consistency issues of an individual state, large or small, can impair the national system. • A related challenge is that the distributed nature of the VSCP makes training, educating, and querying of the source data providers a key aspect of improving and maintaining end data quality, particularly the case for cause-of-death reporting, for which consistency in approach is critically important.
From page 40...
... Noting that the EAB program might be a relatively easy-to-measure case as a pure administrative system, Schwartz argued that these kinds of figures are worth considering in relation to vital statistics. Measuring the value of vital statistics is considerably harder -- trying to quantify things such as the value to research of the data files and the returns of the use of locally held vital records data to populate immunization or lead-exposure registries or to target newborn home visits by nurses.
From page 41...
... As mentioned above, the states and localities must deal with the civil registration aspect of vital events, and the staff and resource allocation to keep up with customer service is a very significant local administrative focus. The key questions are: What is the cost of gleaning the data from the records and the value of the information that the states and localities possess (both in local totals and compiled national data)
From page 42...
... parallels vital statistics in that the source data are essentially administrative records with other legal purposes (in this case, tax filings to unemployment insurance programs) ; it differs from the vital statistics program in having a strongly defined set of legislative requirements for the structure of the federal-state partnership enacted in recent years.
From page 43...
... Through the QCEW program, BLS directly funds its state partners to collect and edit data from the state-based employment insurance programs. As with vital statistics, the underlying data of the QCEW are, essentially, administrative records: the quarterly contribution reports that employers supply to the state-based employment insurance programs when they pay their taxes each quarter.
From page 44...
... . Galvin noted that BLS has typically been successful in securing such "mandatory" increases from the Office of Management and Budget and from congressional appropriators, giving QCEW relatively stable funding.2 As NCHS does with the state vital records offices, BLS negotiates individual QCEW contracts -- cooperative agreements -- with each state.
From page 45...
... can now use the quarterly data to update its personal income estimates four times per year rather than waiting to perform an annual revision. Galvin noted that federal-state cooperation in the QCEW program does occasionally encounter vulnerabilities due to variation in state laws and regulations.
From page 46...
... and completed mostly by using administrative data already maintained by the agency; the surveys are listed in Box 3-1. White noted that completing some data items requires the agency to contact local school districts, who in turn may contact individual schools.
From page 47...
... In 2003, the department launched the Education Data Exchange Network Submission System (EDEN) to provide a common system by which state education agencies could transmit their administrative data.
From page 48...
... In 2006, the Department of Education launched a more overarching system called EDFacts which is a central portal for performance and accountability data reporting, including nonfiscal CCD data.5 White noted that implementation of EDFacts has "done a little damage" to the October 1 reporting deadline. In particular, states that had highly developed data systems in place prior to EDFacts have had a difficult time converting to the new format and its definitions.


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