The Department provides services in many different ways and through many different avenues to the people of Alaska. A necessity of providing and paying for appropriate health care and social services requires that we collect, examine, process and maintain considerable amounts of personal health care information.

While the health care information that we maintain is necessary for us to perform the responsibilities of our jobs as employees of the Department, other individuals and organizations outside of the Department may have valid needs to have specific types of health care information on Alaskans receiving services from this Department.

Below is a list of a variety of DPA forms that have been revised and/or distributed over the course of the last month. Forms can be ordered by following the instructions on DPAweb (How To Order Forms) and can also be obtained from the e-forms website.

I wanted to share with you some good news on our Better Than Average food stamp accuracy improvement campaign. You all know our goal is to perform better than the national average, and achieve at least 93% food stamp payment accuracy in Federal Fiscal Year 2004. So far, your hard work and increased focus on work quality appears to be yielding results. Thank you for your contribution to improving our accuracy.

As many of you know, DPA launches a yearly EITC (Earned Income Tax Credit) campaign to help raise awareness of the benefits of the EITC as well as the Advance EITC. Similar to past efforts, we will once again focus our marketing towards informing Public Assistance recipients of tax credit opportunities.

Here is a brief summary of the Division's campaign activities for 2004:

The Program Integrity and Analysis (PI&A) section has been working to make DPA performance measures available to you online. Currently the District Office, the Work Services performance measures and the Food Stamp Accuracy Campaign pages are available. These measures can be accessed from the PI&A web page.