Company Will Track Down Child-Support Delinquents

Billing itself as a private sector alternative to slow-moving government bureaucracy, a company devoted solely to tracking down parents who fail to pay child support opened its doors Wednesday in Kearny Mesa.

Child Support Services, which may be the first private agency of its kind in San Diego County, promises faster collection of overdue child support payments from deadbeat dads than the overburdened county bureaucracy--for a price.

The company charges a $35 application fee and 25% of anything it collects. If it fails, the client pays nothing besides the application fee.

“The reason we do a better job is that the government bureaus are so backlogged,” said Julie Murphy, director of client services for the new company. “We do nothing but collect child support. We don’t have other things to take our attention away from child support.”

Duane Wilkinson, who heads the county agency that pursues delinquent child support payments, conceded that, in individual cases, a private company may be more efficient than the child support division of the county’s Department of Revenue and Recovery.

The agency has responsibility for 33,000 to 35,000 cases, more than half of which involve delinquencies, Wilkinson said. The rest include mothers on welfare and other divorced parents who want the county to track their case in order to assure payment.

With just 24 employees, the agency handles all cases by computer, looking for unemployment compensation, tax refunds, disability payments or lottery winnings to attach. Murphy’s company uses public records, coupled with personal contact to persuade delinquents to pay up.

But Wilkinson said that divorced parents will find the 25% fee steep when compared to the county’s free service. “They’re not going to get very many people willing to part with 25%,” he said.

But Wilkinson acknowledged that the market is probably large enough to keep the company in business. The private company will not handle cases for women on welfare.

Although Wilkinson’s division persuades fathers to pay at least part of their debts in 40% to 45% of its cases, Murphy claims that private companies in other parts of the country show a success rate of about 48% to 52%. Like some of the other companies, Child Support Services is affiliated with a nonprofit association that shares techniques in locating delinquents and getting them to pay up.

Nationwide, $20 billion in child-support payments will go uncollected in 1992, Murphy claims, $3 billion in California alone. Ninety percent of parents required to pay support are men. Thirty percent pay nothing, and only half of the rest pay the court-ordered level of support.

Murphy insists that many delinquent fathers are simply not contacted and quickly change their ways when they realize someone is after them.

“To be quite frank, once we start getting on the telephone and negotiating with them, you’d be surprised how quickly they start cooperating,” she said.