April 2005

Future of VOCA Funding in Jeopardy

The U.S. Department of Justice’s Office of Victims of Crime (OVC) administers two major formula grant programs, Victim Compensation and Victim Assistance. The funding for these two programs comes from the Crime Victims Fund (the Fund), a separate account established by the 1984 Victims of Crime Act (VOCA). Since its inception, the Fund has been financed not by appropriations from taxpayer revenues, but by fines, penalty assessments and bond forfeitures collected from convicted federal offenders. Legislation passed in 2001 allows the Fund to also receive gifts, donations and bequests from private entities.

OVC distributes money deposited into the Fund directly to states to support compensation and assistance services for victims and survivors of domestic violence, sexual assault, child abuse and other crimes. Each year, states and territories receive VOCA funds through the Victim Assistance program to support community-based organizations that serve victims of crime. For years, many civil legal services programs have received VOCA sub-grants from their states and territories.

Prior to FY 2000, all of the money deposited into the Crime Victims Fund was allocated the following fiscal year according to a formula in the VOCA statute. Because of wide fluctuations in the amount deposited, beginning in FY 2000, Congress began imposing a limitation or "cap" on the amount of Fund deposits that could be obligated the following year.

Congress said it was delaying use of the deposits above the cap in order "to protect against wide fluctuations in receipts into the Fund, and to ensure that a stable level of funding will remain available for these programs in future years." (Conference Report 106-479) Congress also amended the VOCA statute to reflect the preservation of all deposits in the Fund for future VOCA programs.

The amounts remaining in the Fund are carried over from year to year to be used when Fund deposits are less than the next year's cap. Three times in the past six years - in FYs 2002, 2003 and 2004 - Congress has relied on this "rainy day reserve" to meet the amount appropriated for VOCA because of insufficient deposits.

As part of its FY 2006 budget, the Bush Administration is recommending a VOCA cap of $650 million, a $25 million increase to the cap for FYs 2004 and 2005. However, the budget also calls for a rescission, or removal, of all amounts other than the $650 million from the Fund. This includes the "rainy day reserve" and the amounts that will be deposited into the Fund during FY 2006, estimated at over $1.2 billion.

This would mean that there would be nothing in the Crime Victims Fund at the beginning of FY 2007, and that the amounts of VOCA formula grants would depend on what would be deposited into the Fund during FY 2007. This would result in a problematic situation, because the VOCA statute contains a complicated formula that determines how much each state or territory will receive under each VOCA program. The OVC must know the total amount available at the start of each fiscal year in order to calculate those amounts. If the Fund is empty at the beginning of the fiscal year, there is no way for OVC to know how much to award to each of the states and territories.

Congress is now considering the FY 2006 budget. It is especially important that members of the Appropriations Subcommittees with jurisdiction over VOCA (the Senate Commerce, Justice and Science Subcommittee and the House Subcommittee on Science, State, Justice and Commerce) hear from their constituents. For more information about the background of VOCA and the effort to save the Fund, visit the Web site of the National Association of VOCA Assistance Administrators (NAVAA).

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