County’s Child Support Collections Lag : Enforcement: A report says that despite recent increases, the D.A.’s office continues to fall dramatically below state average in obtaining payments from absentee parents.

After his parents divorced, an elementary school boy is forced to drop out of private school because his absent father refused to pay child support to cover the tuition.

A teen-ager whose divorced mother collects food stamps and welfare checks wears hand-me-down clothes and often goes without toilet paper and other personal necessities because her father has failed to pay his share of her support.

A kindergarten boy and his third-grade sister come home to an empty house every day because their mother has moved away and their father, who works all day, is too embarrassed to ask for help.

These--and thousands of other children like them--are the casualties of Los Angeles County’s overburdened and antiquated child support system. During much of the past decade, the district attorney’s office, which is charged with collecting child support from absentee parents, has promised to improve its record.

Officials say that they have increased collections by about 15% in the first 2 1/2 months of this year. But Los Angeles County continues to be dramatically below the state average--and the state continues to fall well below the national average--in almost every aspect of child support, according to a report to be released later this month.

Many mothers and children in Los Angeles County are on welfare, the report found, because absent parents have failed to pay child support.

Last year, the county collected child support payments in only one in 10 such cases, while the rest of the state collected payments for one in every seven cases, the report said. For non-welfare families, the county made collections in only one in every seven cases, whereas the rest of the state collected child support for one in every three cases.

“All we are doing now is trying to hold back the tide,” said Wayne Doss, newly appointed director of the district attorney’s Bureau of Family Support Operations. In his 15 years with the department, he said, he has seen a “stunning explosion” in the number of child support cases.

The report was prepared by the Los Angeles County Child Support Task Force, a citizens task force formed four years ago in response to what women called the abysmal performance in child support collections.

In any given year, nine out of 10 parents--typically mothers on welfare who seek court-ordered child support through the district attorney--fail to receive the money that is due their children, said Pat Griffith, author of the report and a former treasurer of the National Organization for Women. Some parents may wait years for support payments, she said, and some will never get them at all.

“It’s improved, yes, but it’s like the system has gone from an F- to an F+,” said Betty Nordwind, chairman of the task force and executive director of the Harriett Buhai Center for Family Law, a legal services program sponsored by the Black Women Lawyers Assn. of Los Angeles Inc., the Women Lawyers Assn. of Los Angeles and the Los Angeles County Bar Assn.

Gloria Allred said: “If a robber steals any amount of money from a bank, the police or FBI will arrive. . . . If, however, a father steals the same amount from his children by not paying court-ordered child support . . . the odds of being arrested are slim to none.”

For years, Nordwind, Allred and other Los Angeles lawyers involved in women’s issues have been outspoken critics of the district attorney’s office. Allred has staged at least three sit-ins at Dist. Atty. Ira Reiner’s offices since 1985, trying to draw attention to the problems surrounding child support.

With as much fanfare, Reiner has responded with highly publicized “deadbeat dad” roundups, in which investigators move in and handcuff errant fathers who are not supporting their children as required by law. Officials within the department acknowledge that substantive changes in the system have started occurring only during the past year or so.

Last April, Reiner named Doss to streamline the bureau’s sluggish administrative procedures. About the same time, a three-page application form was designed to replace a 19-page form for parents who are seeking child support payments from absentee parents.

Rather than having to appear in person at the district attorney’s office, people can apply by mail for help in collecting back child support payments. Also, the county has initiated a formal training program for caseworkers.

Later this year, the bureau is scheduled to finish installing a $16-million computer system to automate the process of finding absentee parents and collecting child support payments from them.

But more needs to be done, everyone involved in the field agrees. Even those who run the child support collection system acknowledge that fundamental changes must occur to keep pace with the skyrocketing volume of cases.

“The problem can never be resolved until there is a public resolve that there is a problem and that it needs to be solved,” Doss said.

At the state level, the California Office of Child Support Enforcement has contracted with Cal State Chico to launch a major radio, television and newspaper advertising campaign in late May. Modeled after a campaign against drunk driving launched by mothers a decade ago, the child support campaign will try to bring home the message that “failure to pay child support not only costs families and kids, but it also costs taxpayers,” said Leslie L. Frye, branch chief of the Office of Child Support Enforcement.

Last week, Children Now, a California advocacy and policy organization, issued a report showing the extent to which children are on welfare rolls because absent parents are failing to pay child support.

After divorce, absent parents, usually fathers, enjoy a 41% rise in income, but children and their custodial parents, typically mothers, experience a 31% drop in income, the report found. That is enough, the report said, to push many children below the poverty line and onto welfare rolls. Children who live with mothers who have never married also are much more likely to need government assistance.

There are other indirect costs associated with insufficient child support, the Children Now report stated. Poor children are at greater risk of illness, abuse and neglect. They are more likely to drop out of school. They are three times more likely to die in infancy and four times more likely to become pregnant as teen-agers.

Many child support advocates agree with Wendy Lazarus, author of the Children Now report, that it makes “far more sense to improve child support collections than it does to cut welfare programs.” The Legislature is considering a proposal by Gov. Pete Wilson to reduce grants to Aid to Families With Dependent Children recipients by nearly 25%, among other provisions.

Instead, many child support advocates call for greater investment in child support collection systems. For every $1 the state and counties invested in California in 1990, the state saved $2.25 in welfare and other costs, according to Children Now.

One of the serious problems, not only in Los Angeles but in the country as a whole, is that the system is “too complicated, too adversarial, . . . involves too many lawyers and too many different judgments by too many different judges,” Susan Speir said.

She says that in the decade since she started Single Parents United ‘n’ Kids, a nonprofit child support service organization in Long Beach, she has gotten hundreds of thousands of calls and letters from parents, mostly mothers, whose lives and whose children’s lives are being destroyed because absent fathers do “not believe they really have the moral or legal obligation to support their children.”