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CAAP Update provides regular information on items of interest to Community Action agencies in Pennsylvania. |
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| | Legislators to Attend Poverty Simulation |  | |
CAAP and several member agencies will be hosting a poverty simulation on Monday, July 15 for members of the PA House Majority Policy Committee and other legislators.
The committee chairman, Rep. Dave Reed (R-Indiana) will be holding a press conference on Monday at 11:00 a.m. in the Capitol Rotunda to introduce "Empowering Opportunities: Gateways Out of Poverty," a policy initiative by the committee. Following the press conference, legislators will participate in a poverty simulation.
"The poverty simulation will put legislators in uncomfortable situations and give them better understanding of living in poverty," said Megan Shreve of CAAP member agency South Central Community Action Programs. Shreve will be speaking during the press conference and facilitating the poverty simulation.
"This is a great opportunity for Community Action to show our elected officials the barriers and struggles of living in poverty," said Susan Moore of CAAP.
Special thanks to Tay Waltenbaugh for arranging the event and to member agencies Community Action Commission, Community Action Southwest, Westmoreland Community Action and Community Action of Cambria County for providing staff to assist with the event.
For more information on the July 15 event or on the poverty simulation, contact Joe Ostrander. |
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Payday Lending Factors in the Budget Game
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In a surreal move of events, the state budget has not official been approved on time. While Governor Corbett and others congratulated themselves on the passing of another on-time budget, the fact is that a technical aspect of the budget process, the fiscal code, had not made it through the legislature by the June 30 deadline. And it still has not.
The House had passed a fiscal code bill, sent it off to the Senate and went home for a summer break. That's when it gets interesting.
It seems as if House leadership had inserted language on page 55 of the 57 page bill  (Section 19.4) that said the House and Senate majority leaders agreed to vote by the end of October on a new bill to legalize and regulate short-term, high interest loans, known as "payday lending."
This confused, and apparently angered, Senate President Pro Tempore Joe Scarnati (R-Jefferson) and Senate Majority Leader Dominick Pileggi (R-Delaware), both who indicated never agreeing to such a provision. So the Senate voted to strip the language out of the bill (49-0) which it means it has to go back to the House for another go.
The House will be reconvening on Monday at 1:00 p.m. to vote, and possibly re-debate, on the fiscal code bill again.
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Waiting Until 2015
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In a move largely cheered by business groups, the Obama administration announced Tuesday that it would delay the enforcement of one of the more contentious portions of the landmark healthcare law, the requirement that companies with more than 50 workers provide health insurance, to give the affected businesses more time to prepare for the changes in reporting. (Companies with fewer than 50 employees are not affected by the mandate.)
As The Hill notes, however, the move does not affect the mandate for uninsured individuals, who will still be required to purchase personal coverage by January 1, 20  14.
In a blog post, White House Senior Adviser Valerie Jarrett said that the delay will allow time to simplify the reporting required under the ACA.
"Some of this detailed reporting may be unnecessary for businesses that more than meet the minimum standards in the law," she explained. "We will convene employers, insurers, and experts to propose a smarter system and, in the interim, suspend reporting for 2014."
The moratorium, she said, is intended to allow employers more opportunity "to test the new reporting systems and make any necessary adaptations to their health benefits" before the mandate goes into effect.
The administration emphasized that other portions of the law-most notably, the creation of health insurance exchanges-will be implemented on time. This contradicts a June report by the Government Accountability Office that suggested some aspects of the exchanges' implementation were behind schedule.
The National Restaurant Association, the International Franchise Association and the National Retail Federation, among others, hailed the news of the delay. "I think there has been a growing drumbeat on everything, from concern on the Hill to reports on teachers' aides saying their hours were dropped, and I think the pragmatic and wise course of action was taken," NRF Vice President Neil Trautwein told Politico. The delay will give business groups more time to work with the IRS as it hashes out regulations under the law, he said.
Meanwhile, some critics have suggested that the administration should go further. The Washington Post's Ezra Klein, a noted liberal pundit, argued that the employer mandate should be repealed altogether.
"By tying the penalties to how many full-time workers an employer has, and how many of them qualify for subsidies, the mandate gives employers a reason to have fewer full-time workers, and fewer low-income workers," Klein wrote.
H e also noted a point made by Mark Duggan of the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School of Business: The employer mandate's coverage is likely limited, as most businesses with more than 50 employees already offer their employees some form of health insurance. "It's basically 10,000 or so employers who have more than 50 employees and don't offer coverage," Duggan told Klein.
The Baltimore Sun's editorial board called the move "an embarrassment [for the Obama administration], but it doesn't begin to undermine the good that will be done by the Affordable Care Act."
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| | A Major Need | | |
The National Community Action Foundation (NCAF) is in major need of donations for its operations and for CAP-PAC.
For longer than one can remember, NCAF has been the front line protector of  Community Action, CSBG, Weatherization and LIHEAP. The legislative struggles overcome in the past are because of the tireless efforts of NCAF.
Please donate today and ensure the continued efforts of NCAF.
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| | Will COPPA Affect Your Agency? | | |
For the first time in 15 years, the Federal Trade Commission has revamped the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act. If your agency attempts to reach children online, these changes could affect you.
One of the earliest efforts to regulate the way organizations use the internet has gotten an update.
The Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA), first passed in 1998, had gone without significant modification for years until the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), which accepted comments on the proposed updates last year, approved changes in December that went into effect July 1st.a
If your agency reaches children online, the changes could affect you. Here's what you should keep in mind:
Consent requirement: Attorney Tyler Newby explains that the changes to the law are largely meant to reflect the web's increasingly social nature. "Reflecting the growth of social networks, user-generated content, and child-oriented mobile apps," Newby writes, "operators of child-directed sites now must obtain verifiable parental consent before they can collect users' screen names; photo, video, and audio files that contain a child's image or voice; geolocation data precise enough to identify a street and city; and persistent identifiers, such as cookies, an IP address, or unique mobile device identifier."
Even "Like" buttons matter: As lawyer Liisa M. Thomas writes on the Association of Corporate Counsel's Lexology site, one of the rule changes affects commonly used social media plug-ins, such as Facebook's "Like" button. In some cases, she notes, the buttons are allowed, but only if they meet certain criteria. "[F]or a plug-in that is used in a way that meets these criteria, an exception to the requirement to notify parents and get their consent will apply, provided that the rule wasn't triggered in some other way," she writes.
How to ensure you comply: On a clearinghouse website, the FTC offers a six-step list explaining how to ensure that your privacy policy is up to date and reflects current standards. The key: step six, which encourages a reasonable effort to protect the security of children's personal information.
"Minimize what you collect in the first place," the FTC advises. "Take reasonable steps to release personal information only to service providers and third parties capable of maintaining its confidentiality, security, and integrity. Get assurances they'll live up to those responsibilities. Hold on to personal information only as long as is reasonably necessary for the purpose for which it was collected. Securely dispose of it once you no longer have a legitimate reason for retaining it."
If you have questions on whether your site complies, the FTC has made an email hotline available at COPPAHotLine@ftc.gov.
For organizations that fail to comply with the new rules, the fine is steep-reaching $16,000 per violation of the law.
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| | About Us | | |
Community Action Association of Pennsylvania
222 Pine Street
Harrisburg, PA 17101
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This newsletter is financed, in part, by a CSBG grant from the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, Department of Community and Economic Development. |
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