42 U.S.C. § 679 — Collection of data relating to adoption and foster care

(a) Advisory Committee on Adoption and Foster Care Information. (1) Within 90 days after October 21, 1986, the Secretary must create an Advisory Committee on Adoption and Foster Care Information. The Committee must study ways to establish, run, and pay for a United States system for collecting adoption and foster-care data. (2) The study must: (A)(i) identify the data needed to keep measuring how often adoption and foster care occur, their features, and their status in the United States; (ii) identify the data needed to develop suitable national adoption and foster-care policies; (B) examine whether it is workable and suitable to collect data about privately arranged adoptions and adoptions arranged by private agencies without help from public child-welfare agencies; (C) examine whether different data-collection methods are valid; and (D) examine the financial and administrative effect of using each method. (3) By October 1, 1987, the Committee must give the Secretary and Congress a report with the study results. It must evaluate the different methods and make recommendations about establishing, running, and paying for the data system. (4)(A) Subject to (B), the Secretary decides the Committee’s membership and organization. (B) The Committee must include representatives of: (i) private nonprofit child-welfare organizations, including organizations providing foster-care and adoption services; (ii) organizations representing State and local agencies responsible for those services; (iii) organizations representing State and local agencies responsible for collecting health and social statistics; (iv) organizations representing State and local courts with family-law authority; (v) Federal agencies responsible for collecting health and social statistics; and (vi) organizations and agencies involved in privately arranged or international adoptions. (5) The Committee ends after it submits the report required by paragraph (3). (b) Report to Congress; regulations. (1)(A) By July 1, 1988, the Secretary must send Congress a report that: (i) proposes a way to establish, run, and pay for the United States adoption and foster-care data system; (ii) examines whether collecting data about privately arranged adoptions and private-agency adoptions without public-agency help is workable and suitable; and (iii) examines the proposed system’s effect on the agencies that would carry it out. (B) The report must: (i) identify any legal changes needed to carry out the proposed system; and (ii) describe the system that paragraph (2) will put in place if those changes are not made. (2) By December 31, 1988, the Secretary must issue final regulations to carry out either (A) the proposed system or (B) if the required legal changes have not been enacted, the alternative system described in paragraph (1)(B)(ii). The regulations must provide for full implementation by October 1, 1991. (c) Data collection system. Any system developed under this section must: (1) avoid unnecessarily taking resources away from adoption and foster-care agencies; (2) ensure collected data is reliable and consistent over time and among jurisdictions by using uniform definitions and methods; (3) provide complete national information about: (A) the demographic features of adoptive and foster children and their biological, adoptive, or foster parents; (B) the foster-care population’s status, including its size, placement lengths and types, whether children are available for adoption, and goals for ending or continuing foster care; (C) the number and features of (i) children placed in or removed from foster care, (ii) children adopted or whose adoptions ended, and (iii) children placed outside the State responsible for placement and care; (D) the extent and nature of Federal, State, and local adoption and foster-care assistance and the features of the children receiving it; and (E) each year’s number of foster children identified as sex-trafficking victims, separating those victimized before entering foster care from those victimized while in foster care; and (4) use suitable requirements and incentives so the system works reliably throughout the United States. (d) Data collection on adoption and legal-guardianship disruption and dissolution. To improve knowledge about creating strong, permanent families, the Secretary must issue regulations for collecting and analyzing information about children who enter State-supervised foster care after an adoption or legal guardianship was finalized. Each State with a plan approved under this part must collect and report the number of those children. The regulations may also require information about how long the earlier adoption or guardianship lasted, the child’s age then, the child’s age when later entering State-supervised foster care, the type of agency that made the earlier placement, and other factors needed to understand post-adoption or post-guardianship entry into foster care.