Alaska sees efficiency gains after adopting a new child support system
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By leveraging an off-the-shelf solution, Alaska was able to overhaul a decades-old case management platform within two years.
Government modernization efforts can be incredibly costly for cash-strapped agencies and take years to lift off the ground, if they make it far in the first place. In Alaska, however, recent modernization of its child support system has shown state leaders that such initiatives can be done on time and within budget.
The Alaska Child Support Enforcement Division, which ensures child support payments are collected and disbursed, recently replaced its 25-year-old case management system with a modernized solution that took just two years to go live.
The agency began its case management modernization project in February 2024, after state leaders realized the legacy platform used outdated system language and there were no longer any programmers or their resources to maintain it anymore, said Chris Tran, director of CSED.
By October 2025, the cloud-enabled Alaska Child Support Enforcement Services System was already live and operational for the 36,000 children and their families CSED serves, Tran said.
During that time, CSED prioritized cleaning and standardizing data from its legacy system so that “we were not dumping garbage into the new system,” he explained. The agency also conducted a program modernization to align business requirements across the system to ensure a smoother rollout of the new technology.
ACSESS also became the first commercial-off-the-shelf child support solution in the nation to be federally certified last month, he said. The system was developed by government software consultant Fast Enterprises.
Commercial-off-the-shelf solutions can yield significant time and cost savings for state agencies that are responsible for delivering critical resources to constitutions, making such services “a really exciting option available to a state when they go down the route of modernization,” Tran said.
While use of the new ACSESS is “still early on,” results are “so far so good,” Tran said.
Since it went live, for instance, the modernized system has helped distribute more than $44.1 million in financial support to families in Alaska with a 100% system uptime launch, according to state officials.
The new system can also be accessed through mobile devices and includes four new self-service portals that expand access to ACSESS for parents and caregivers, employers, tribes and third-party verification services.
Indeed, preliminary data shows that 75% of online transactions thus far have been completed on a mobile device, state officials said in a statement.
The system leverages automation and a central system of record to increase the efficiency of payment distribution services so that caseworkers can prioritize more urgent tasks, Tran said.
Additionally, ACSESS has helped reduce the department’s reliance on paper-based communications and document processing times because it enables electronic communication between caseworkers and families.
Tran said CSED will continue to track system performance metrics and outcomes, such as payment collection rates or mobile device usage, to further evaluate ACSESS’ long-term impact on agency efficiency and service delivery.
“I think the future is bright, and I'm really looking forward to the day we say, ‘Yep, all that work really paid off,’” Tran said.