Child Support Privatization Proposal to Go Before Board

County Supervisor Mike Antonovich unveiled a motion Friday to begin privatizing Dist. Atty. Gil Garcetti’s beleaguered child support agency.

“The system is broken, and the time is past due for it to be fixed,” said Antonovich, citing litanies of stories of erroneously billed parents and uncollected child support.

Antonovich’s motion represents the most dramatic step yet to overhaul Garcetti’s troubled office, which fails to collect child support nine times out of 10 and knowingly bills men who are not biological fathers of children they are ordered to support.

The motion will be considered at Tuesday’s supervisors’ meeting, where Garcetti is also scheduled to present a plan for improving his child support unit. That plan has been a closely kept secret. State law vests sole authority for running child support programs at the county level with the district attorney.

A spokeswoman for Garcetti said that although the district attorney is supportive of using private companies for special tasks, he would oppose attempts to privatize his unit “lock, stock and barrel.”

The influential union representing many of the 1,400 workers in Garcetti’s child support office has also announced its opposition to privatization, although it has said it would not necessarily object to using the private sector to augment its efforts.

Antonovich’s motion calls for county staff to draft proposals for bids from private companies that would handle “the investigation and payments” of child support.

In a prepared statement, Antonovich cited “horror stories” from a public hearing his office held on child support last week along with “thousands of letters” to his office as proof that “the district attorney’s office continues to fail in their child support mission.”

The statement cites one pilot project from a decade ago in which a private collection firm found 47% of the parents that the district attorney’s office said it had been unable to locate.

The supervisors last month proposed doing another such pilot program, but Antonovich’s office has argued that the board should move straight to privatization.

Other ideas, such as using other county departments to do some tasks or altering state law to shift some responsibilities away from district attorneys, have also been floated after a series in The Times in October. The Times found that Garcetti’s office ranks worst in the state, uses hardball legal tactics against low-income fathers and holds millions of dollars due families it says it cannot locate.