Evaluation of the Ticket to Work Program, Implementation ...

78According to their representatives, most of these modest-revenue ENs would acceptmore Tickets if they had more money to cover costs. The absence of up-front funding, theslow revenue stream, and the payments forgone for lack of documentation made it difficultfor these ENs to grow. If their revenue streams pick up, most of them would devote moreresources to TTW, such as hiring new staff or devoting more existing staff time to theprogram. One EN official said, “If we had more funding to hire another staff member, the[placement] numbers would definitely go up. But we’re always waiting to get paid.”ENs with No Payment Revenues. Fourteen of the 29 ENs that accepted at least oneTicket had not generated a single payment at the time of the interview. As explained below,3 of the 14 showed some promise for success, as they were expecting to generate paymentsin the near future.• One EN helped 12 Ticket holders leave the rolls, but it had not submitted anypayment claims to SSA because it had not been able to collect earningsdocumentation. A representative said he planned to establish a system to collectthe documentation and submit invoices to SSA.• The second EN was going to employ TTW beneficiaries directly because theowner felt that this would greatly facilitate the collection of earningsdocumentation.• The third EN’s president reported that 6 beneficiaries were earning an incomeabove the SGA level, and she was aiming to have 10 beneficiaries generatingpayments by 2005.For the remaining 11 ENs that generated no payments, there was little or no sign thatthey could expect payments anytime soon. Their level of participation in the program wasvery low. Two of them, in fact, essentially did not consider themselves as TTW participantsat the time of the interview despite the fact that they had accepted one or more Tickets inthe past. One reported being shut out of the market by the SVRA; the other reported that itdid not fully understand the responsibilities of an EN when it joined the program and wasunwilling to make the effort necessary to help beneficiaries find jobs. A variety of factorsexplains why the other nine had low participation levels that seemed to limit their potentialfor collecting Ticket payments. For example, two are small organizations with limitedcapacity; a few prefer to serve beneficiaries whose Tickets are held by an SVRA, so they arecompensated under a fee-for-service agreement; one typically refers beneficiaries to anational EN that shares payments with the beneficiaries; and one rarely encourages clients toleave the benefits rolls, believing that most of the beneficiaries they serve need cashassistance.Like the ENs with modest payment revenues, ENs with no payment revenuescomplained most often about the TTW payment system and sometimes about the burden ofresponding to telephone inquiries from Ticket holders. Virtually all would like SSA tochange the payment system so that funding is provided for up-front services. Onerepresentative suggested that the ENs should be able to request up-front funding in the IWPV: EN Participation in Ticket to Work