Child Support Collections in State Jump 14.3%

A statewide crackdown on parents who neglect to pay child support has resulted in a record 14.3% increase in support collections in California during the past year, the state Department of Social Services reported Wednesday.

Officials said nearly half the $636 million collected by district attorneys throughout the state came from absent parents whose families have been forced to go on welfare. Child support collected from those parents is then used to offset welfare payments.

Calling the increase “impressive,” Lonnie Carlson, the department’s interim director, said it was the result of a coordinated effort by district attorneys to pursue delinquent parents, particularly fathers, and of new laws which gave them the tools to force absent parents to pay up.

He said especially effective was a law backed by Sen. Gary K. Hart (D-Santa Barbara) that requires judges to order that child support payments be automatically deducted from the absent parent’s paycheck.

“It just seemed crazy,” said Hart, “that so many people were not paying child support and it just seemed that to deduct it from people’s wages was a relatively simple way to get it.”

Hart said the failure of so many fathers to pay child support has been a leading cause of poverty among women and children. He said this has been especially true in California, where child support collections in the past have been among the lowest in the nation.

Wayne Doss, director of the bureau of family support for Los Angeles Dist. Atty. Ira Reiner, said collections in his county have risen 9.8% in the past year through a “massive effort” to locate and prosecute delinquent parents.

“It’s my belief that one of the major factors that we have to aggressively tackle is the public perception that not paying child support is no big deal,” he said. “We need to develop an ethic in society that not paying child support is a bad thing and it will not be tolerated.”