The Wisconsin welfare program “Wisconsin Works,” or W-2, may not be working to the best of its capacity, according to state officials.

A report, issued Thursday by the Legislative Fiscal Bureau, says the program, designed in 1995 to help its participants find work, remains a mixed success.

“Approximately 20 percent of former participants earned more than the poverty level in the year after they left W-2, while the majority likely did not,” the report says.

While the report finds immediate improvement was not often seen, it does cite more success for participants several years after the program. The percentage of participants with incomes above the poverty level increased somewhat from 2000 to 2003.

“42.1 percent of those who left W-2 in 1999 earned more than the poverty level in 2003, after the inclusion of several tax credits,” the report says.

State representative Suzanne Jeskewitz, R-Menomonee Falls, Co-chair of the state’s Joint Legislative Audit Committee, said she believes the program is successful and may simply need some improvements.

“This is a nice report card about what has been happening in the W-2 program,” Jeskewitz said. “There are some new specifications need to be set into the contracts. This will be good for us in the future so we can look back at what we did wrong and what we did right.”

The W-2 program, which mainly works with mothers who have dependent infants, spent a total of $1.5 billion from September 1997 to June 2004. This was mainly spent in the form of program services and cash benefits for participants.

There is some concern in the report that many participants were overpaid.

“We estimate that W-2 agencies paid 2,500 custodial parents of infants longer than the statutory maximum 12 weeks, resulting in $1.3 million in excess payments,” the report says.

Though Jeskewitz says the overpayments are a problem, the program has overall put the money to good use.

“The participants have decreased from 55,000 to 15,000,” Jeskewitz said. “The goal is to get people off of welfare and into work.”

In some ways, we have done a good job, she added.

The report also highlights many of the participants are returning to subsidized employment after leaving the program. The report finds returning participants increased from 38.6 percent in subsidized placements in 2000 to 52.3 percent in 2004.

The report concludes the W-2 program has been successful for some participants but faces many challenges, especially in the Milwaukee area, where participants in Milwaukee County comprised 79.8 percent of the program.

The bureau offers many recommendations for improvements, such as increasing consistency between W-2 agencies, ending payments at the appropriate time and developing better practices for recording information about participants.

Jeskewitz said she feels the report shows the program is, in general, quite successful.

“We are the model for the United States,” Jeskewitz said. “We are the ones who started the work-not-welfare program.”

Every program needs to have an evaluation — and we have done a thorough evaluation this time and we learned some things that will benefit us in the future, she added.