Monday, April 02, 2001

Child support: Is worst over?

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Ohio incurred problems in transition

By Susan Vela
The Cincinnati Enquirer

        While some Ohioans remain at the mercy of a new statewide system of collecting and tracking child support payments, advocates and social service officials are certain that relief is down the road.

        Ohio is like other states that have grappled with politics, federal fines, computer problems and payment delays to comply with a 1988 federal law.

        That law was intended to track records and leave fewer families without the money due them, officials say.

        Penalties began kicking in four years ago for states delinquent in establishing such statewide systems. Ohio has paid almost $50 million for its delays.

        In October, Ohio's 846,000 child support cases came under state control. Until then, the state's 88 counties handled the individual cases.

        “We're not all that different from other states. Every state has its own tale of wrong. It's just very difficult to figure out what's really wrong in Ohio,” said Geraldine Jensen, president of the Toledo-based Association for Children for the Enforcement of Support, or ACES.

        The group is asking the Ohio Court of Appeals in Franklin County to order the state to send $13 million in delayed, lost and illegally withheld child support payments to thousands of single-parent families living in Ohio.

        The state concedes that it could owe about $6 million in back child support.

        The state needs “outside experts to get in and do an independent review of the system to see if it can be fixed or (if the state should) just start over. It's a mess,” Ms. Jensen said.

        Joe Brickler of Alexandria agreed. He spent months trying to convince Ohio that his child support obligations to his daughter were up to date. The state threatened to withhold money from this year's income tax refund unless he paid up. He did so and recently was reimbursed.

        He remains angry.

        “I feel that this is going to happen in the future again,” Mr. Brickler said. “I don't feel like they're ever going to change how they treat parents as far as what's right and what's wrong.”

        Yet collection rates have blossomed under the new system. Between 1996 and

        2000, Ohio's collection rate jumped about 30 percent; Indiana's, 70 percent; and Kentucky's, 64 percent.
       

Other states' woes

               However, enforcing the 1988 law has caused a nightmare of administrative problems across the nation, as cases once handled by counties suddenly fall under the state's control.

        Some examples:

        • Illinois' new child support system kicked into place in October 1999. The state contracted with the DuPage County circuit clerk's office to handle the processing. Tens of thousands of families were left waiting for checks, sometimes for months.

        In March 2000, DuPage County said it would not renew its contract with the Illinois Department of Public Aid, leaving the state to find a new vendor.

        “The ultimate loser was the children and the families. This is the difficulty sometimes between eating and not eating,” said Nancy Woodward, child support administrator for the state.

        • Michigan still has 10 counties - including Wayne County, home to Detroit, and Ingham County, home to Lansing, the state's capital - that are not part of the statewide system. The state has accrued $30 million in federal fines because of the delays.

        • California's total fines will surpass $200 million this year because it doesn't have a statewide system in place. An earlier attempt met with little success, said Terry Brooks of the California Department of Child Support.

        The child support department was founded in January 2000 to get a working statewide system in place in two years. In the meantime, the state continues to pay federal fines because there is no unified system in place to handle the state's more than 2 million child support cases.

        • Indiana rolled out its first county in 1994. The last county was in 1999. Both county clerks and county prosecutors had been handling child support collection, which meant delays in the conversion.

        In 1999, Indiana's social service agency was sitting on more than $9 million in child support payments which were not going to families because of processing problems, including programming errors and wrong addresses.

        “You're talking about a large amount of data,” said Joe Mamlin, Indiana's child support director. ""Every state that I've talked to has come to some sort of problem. It does become difficult (but) it certainly is not impossible.”

        Other states concur and are determined to iron out the kinks.
       

Start from square one?

               Don Thomas, Hamilton County's human services director, recently announced that he would retire by Aug. 31. However, last month, he said Ohio's new child support system could be beyond repair.

        He suggested that the state should let the counties go back to distributing money and that the General Assembly should set up emergency programs to help people who do not receive their checks.

        But, “at this point, I want to give them a chance and see what happens,” he said. “The more time passes by, the less local systems are accurate. It's not perfect, but the bugs are being cleared up. There are real efforts being made to improve the system.”

        China Widener, acting deputy director for child support at the Ohio Department of Job and Family Services, also said the state needs to improve its present system before starting over. The sheer size of the system is one of the biggest challenges, she said.

        “We have to have a single state system. (Otherwise) we'll just be fined every year. That obviously would be unacceptable to the state. It's just a matter of working through (the) challenges,” she said.

-- Anonymous, April 02, 2001

Answers

Audit finds fault with agency

A performance audit of Summit County's Child Support Enforcement Agency by the state's Department of Family Services revealed that the agency run by the prosecutor's office failed to deliver adequate services in six of eight categories.

This despite the agency having 20 percent more people, earning 32 percent higher salaries and collecting 11 percent more payments, according to Summit County Prosecutor Sherri Bevan Walsh's office.

Unless the agency rights itself by 2002, it will begin to be penalized with the loss of some state money.

But the man who was Summit County prosecutor during the time of the audit, Michael Callahan, remained skeptical of the state's study, which looked at 223 out of 50,000 cases.

``It seems to me when you take a random 223 out of 50,000 cases, you're not going to get an accurate read,'' Callahan said.

Some of the categories considered as few as six cases.

Callahan said it would be more convincing if the state issued its report card looking at all of the county's cases.

Callahan lost a bitter election battle last year to Walsh. Since the audit was completed in April, CSEA has tried to implement remedies, which were presented to the Summit County Council last night.

Especially woeful was the county's enforcement of medical support, which the state found the county did adequately in only 14 percent of the cases. The state requires a 75 percent compliance rate.

``Our enforcement was extremely lax,'' current CSEA head Edward Harshbarger told the Summit County Council last night. Harshbarger made sure to mention last night that each infraction occurred under the ``previous administration.''

Harshbarger came on board this year with Walsh. The audit looked at a period between Oct. 1, 1999, to Sept. 30, 2000, when current County Councilman Callahan's administrators ran the CSEA.

To concentrate on medical enforcement, CSEA is looking for outside vendors, and its staff will receive training June 13.

The audit also found the county failed in establishing medical insurance orders, establishing the paternity of children born out of wedlock, enforcement, modification of orders and meeting a six-month deadline for establishing orders.

Callahan said ``95 percent'' of the agency's problems last year stemmed from the county's switch to a new computer system that had been mandated by the state. The county was one of the last in the state to switch when it did in July. Callahan said that was because the county's system was better than the state's.

As a result of the switch, Callahan said support checks sometimes took days or weeks to reach mothers, but before the switch they were issued regularly.

``If you go to a woman on the street, she doesn't care about these problems,'' Callahan said. ``She wants the check there every Friday.''

He added that if his office concentrated too much on enforcement, then so be it.

``By God, if that's my legacy, then I'm proud of it,'' he said. ``I'm proud of the work the people at (CSEA) did for the kids of Summit County.''

Councilwoman Andrea Norris said she expected the audit to find things amiss with CSEA. She said the agency will now be under pressure to perform.

``We're going to sit on (Harshbarger) every six months,'' she said. The council will hear from the agency again in December. ``I knew we weren't going to be pleased.''

Another problem is the agency is operating in the red at the rate of $40,000 per month. That has led to the dismissal of 14 employees through various means since January. Harshbarger said the agency has been able to cut expenses by about $10,000 a month, but may need to come to the county for help out of the general fund.

``I'm amenable to increasing the budget,'' Norris said.

Until then, the agency has to cut expenses while improving services.

Among the cuts Harshbarger noted last night were the elimination of a class of supervisors, outsourcing more of its services to private firms that handle child support issues through state contracts and wiping out some perks such as cable television.

The agency is also in the midst of a financial audit, which Harshbarger said should be complete in about 30 days.

But at the root of the issue, at least for Norris, is that something needs to be done at CSEA to make it a more fiscally responsible and quality agency.

``We've been in the basement for too long,'' Norris said. ``Let's fix it and move on.''

The Beacon Journal

-- Anonymous, June 05, 2001