TRADE ACT PARTICIPANT REPORT

 

SUMMARY OF CHANGES

 

The Trade Act Participant Report (TAPR) is the mechanism for the Division of Trade Adjustment Assistance (DTAA) to report on program performance and participant outcomes for the Trade Adjustment Assistance (TAA) and NAFTA Transitional Adjustment Assistance (NAFTA-TAA) programs. The population served by the TAA and NAFTA-TAA programs is a subset of the population formerly served by the dislocated worker program authorized under Title III of the Job Training Partnership Act (JTPA). Therefore, the current TAPR, which has been in effect since the beginning of fiscal year 1999, was modeled closely after the Standardized Program Information Report (SPIR) used by the dislocated worker program.

The enactment of the Workforce Investment Act of 1998 (WIA) has fundamentally changed the Federal employment and training programs. In particular, the program performance and participant outcomes reporting system for the adult dislocated worker program has been substantially changed. Beginning July 1, 2000, Federal programs authorized under Title I of WIA will use the Workforce Investment Act Standardized Record Data (WIASRD) system. Also, the TAA and NAFTA-TAA programs are now required partners in State One-Stop systems. In view of these changes, it has become necessary to revise the TAPR to keep it in close coordination with the WIASRD.

This document is a summary of the changes to the TAPR. The most important changes are the use of wage record data to determine whether participants have become reemployed and what their post-program earnings are. The wage record data replaces data that could only be collected by tracking all individual participants after they exited the program. Another important change is to incorporate the latest OMB guidelines for reporting race and ethnicity. There are other changes that make the data fields of the TAPR match the order and the format of the equivalent data fields in the WIASRD.

Section I. Identification and Characteristics of Applicant

  1. Each individual is assigned an identifier which is not the person's Social Security Number. This is required by the terms of OMB clearance and by the Social Security Act for reporting sensitive individual data, which cannot be identified by SSN.

  2. The Race and Ethnicity fields are now in compliance with the most recent OMB directives. There are now five fields for reporting race and an additional, independent one for reporting ethnicity (Hispanic or not).

  3. The fields have been slightly reordered so that they are in the same order as the equivalent fields in the WIASRD.

  4. Date formats are now YYYYMMDD, changed from MMDDYYYY.

  5. A field identifying Pell Grant recipients has been added.

  6. The field for wage at qualifying separation has been dropped. Wage record data will replace this information.

  7. The veteran status field now has three choices.

  8. The highest school grade completed field now has only one choice for education beyond the bachelor's degree. Also, there are now separate choices for regular high school diploma and for GED.

Section II. Activity and Service Record

 

  1. Type of training has been expanded from one to three fields. Each type of training can now be identified separately.

  2. A field for date of registration for a WIA Title I program has replaced the field for

  3. The Other Federal Coenrollment field has been updated to include National Emergency Grant recipients, and the Pell Grant recipient information now has its own field in Section I.

 

Section III. Outcomes

  1. This section has been substantially changed to incorporate the wage record method of recording reemployment and earnings replacement. Therefore, the fields for entered unsubsidized employment, hours worked per week, hourly wage at termination, receives fringe benefits, State where job is located, and job covered by Unemployment Insurance have been dropped.

  2. Fields for date of exit (formerly termination, but the definition is the same), occupational code, and recalled by layoff employer have been retained.

  3. Fields for employed in first full quarter after exit, employed in third full quarter after exit, and earnings for the following quarters: three and two quarters prior to the quarter of qualifying separation, and first, second and third full quarters following the quarter of exit have all been added.

Finally, the TAPR data must be submitted to ETA's Office of Technology and Information Services (OTIS) over the Internet. OTIS has specified that data files must be in comma-delimited format. That is, each data item in a record is separated from the next one by a comma. There is no need to count the number of characters in a field, nor any need to pad a data item with zeroes to fit a fixed field size. However, each data item must be surrounded by double quotes. Any missing or unknown data items must be shown as consecutive double quotes between the commas. The attached instructions provide further information.