A Disgraceful System

It’s heartbreaking and infuriating, the legions of lives ruined by a flawed, plodding and bureaucratically unfeeling child support enforcement system in Los Angeles County. It fails to collect support for nine out of 10 cases filed on behalf of children who enter the system; when payment is demanded, the target is sometimes a man not the father, which leads to fresh disaster. The chronic failures of the system range from lax management to a balky, costly computer system. The district attorney’s office must be called to account, and county and state government must between them repair it.

“Failure to Provide: Los Angeles County’s Child Support Crisis,” a Times investigative series that ends today, documents horror stories of families losing their homes and forced into homeless shelters or onto welfare for lack of child support, though the absent parent could have been located in minutes. Written by Greg Krikorian and Nicholas Riccardi, the series also chronicles the ruin visited on mistakenly identified deadbeats, their wages garnisheed, their real families destroyed by a system that resists correcting its mistakes. The D.A.’s office is equally slow in finding real deadbeat parents, even when given pertinent, detailed identifying information such as Social Security numbers, addresses, employment history and telephone numbers.

Dist. Atty. Gil Garcetti touts the more than $230 million collected last year, but it amounts to a teardrop in the ocean of the county’s huge volume of cases, more than in 40 entire states. Garcetti also blames delays on support workers overwhelmed by caseloads of more than 2,000 families. But the Board of Supervisors, suspicious of Garcetti’s staffing and spending priorities, has not approved his request to double the number of caseworkers. Garcetti boasts of changes such as a new calling center scheduled to open this month, prompted by a damning Price Waterhouse audit last year that reported desperate parents calling hundreds of times before getting through. The district attorney also defends a $55-million computer system that, even after being “fixed,” still misidentifies fathers.

The L.A. County child support enforcement system routinely ranks last of 58 counties, according to the nonprofit group Children Now, in a state that is notoriously negligent in collecting child support and has no functioning statewide child support enforcement computer network, as required by Washington. The problem begins in Sacramento, because the state delegates this important, federally mandated job to county district attorneys. So the solution will have to start with the next governor and Legislature. First, they should ask some questions: Should prosecutors, who would rather put away murderers than track down negligent fathers and a few irresponsible mothers, remain in charge of this task? Is child support collection such a low priority, such a dead end that it attracts neither the best nor the brightest in any district attorney’s office? If so, Sacramento should swiftly consider privatizing collection, taking control of it at the state level, as is done in other states, or delegating this important responsibility to another agency.

Some counties do a better job than L.A. County. Alameda, which includes Oakland, and Fresno, with a highly transient population, get better results. To increase accountability at the county level, Sacramento should provide greater incentives for accuracy, thoroughness and speed in child support collections, in the same way that the federal government rewards states that significantly reduce welfare caseloads and punishes those that fail to meet deadlines.

The Little Hoover Commission, in a critical 1997 report on the state’s collection efforts, advised the Legislature that child support should be an inescapable obligation. It should also be accurately rendered. There can be no more excuses for the lack of accountability at the state or county level, no more tolerance for a system that fails so many children.