Unpaid Child Support Cases on Rise in O.C. : Families: The caseload jumped 28% in 1994 and keeps growing. A new state program may help track offenders.

By LISA RICHARDSON

May 15, 1995 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

ORANGE —

Marie Kozuharov’s nearly empty $300,000 home still gleams with the shine of high-grade granite counters and cream-colored stone floors--the only reminders of her former affluence and 15 years of marriage to Georgi Kozuharov, a dealer of tile and marble.

In December, 1993, Georgi Kozuharov moved out, and has paid no spousal or child support since--except for payments to their daughter’s private school and utility bills, both Kozuharovs said. Marie and the teen-ager have been living in their five-bedroom, three-bathroom house on $490 in monthly welfare payments and $174 a month in food stamps.

For the record:

12:00 a.m. May 26, 1995 For the Record
Los Angeles Times Friday May 26, 1995 Orange County Edition Part A Page 3 Metro Desk 1 inches; 34 words Type of Material: Correction
Child support--A May 15 report on legal efforts to collect delinquent child support payments significantly overstated the size of a San Clemente house once inhabited by Christina Henrick and her daughter. The house is about 2,500 square feet.

After more than a year without receiving mortgage payments, the bank finally foreclosed on the home May 1.

“How am I going to be able to take care of my daughter?” Marie Kozuharov cried. “Where are we going to go?”

Georgi Kozuharov agreed he has not paid the entire $4,000 in monthly family support ordered by the court. But Kozuharov said he pays what he can, about $1,200 a month.

“And I have had to borrow money from friends just to do that,” he said.

Because Marie Kozuharov and her daughter receive welfare, the county is suing Georgi Kozuharov for child support. But even as such efforts to clamp down on those who do not pay child support intensify, the number of such parents in Orange County continues to climb rapidly.

In July, 1994, the district attorney’s office was handling 120,000 cases of parents who were not paying child support--a 28% increase from 1993, when it was working on 98,000 cases. At the current rate, the office will add 20,000 new cases this year. About 95% of the county’s non-paying parents are fathers.

“It’s increasing at just an uncontrollable rate,” said Jan Sturla, the deputy district attorney in charge of the county’s family support division. “It’s beyond disgraceful . . . and frankly I’m not sure we all look at it with the proper horror.”

The human costs to children who do not receive the payments are incalculable, but the lack of child support takes a more specific toll on taxpayers.

Welfare expenditures for county women and children that are the direct result of insufficient child support totaled $131.7 million for 1994, according to Angelo Doti, director of financial assistance for the Orange County Social Services Agency. About $5 million of that sum comes from county coffers. The balance is state and federal money.

“The fact is that the vast majority--about 80%--of people on (Aid to Families with Dependent Children) are on aid because parents are not meeting their financial responsibilities to care for their children,” Doti said.

But a more efficient way to collect money from non-paying parents is on the horizon. Next month, Orange County will become one of 14 California counties to join a new program in which the state Franchise Tax Board board uses its sophisticated computer system to track down delinquent parents and make them pay.

California already will not issue professional licenses to men who do not pay child support and, as of last Monday, the Social Security Administration began accepting requests from states to help find delinquents who might have assumed false identities.

But the Franchise Tax Board computer can accomplish in a day the work that now takes weeks of laborious research for county employees.

“They don’t have an automated collection process,” tax board spokesman Jim Shepard said. “And because we do, we’re able to rapidly sort through over 200 million income records to identify delinquent parents.

“Also, if counties want to attach wages or an account, they have to go through the courts, while we’re able to do it directly, through the revenue and taxation code.”

In a pilot program last year, $34 million was collected in six counties--much more than the $12 million anticipated.

But advocates for fathers say that men don’t pay because they don’t have the money to do so. Rather, many fathers are in arrears because they do not know they should seek reduced support orders from the court when their finances change, they contend.

“Lawyers and judges seem to believe that your average guy automatically knows that he can go back to court for a reduction,” said Marvin Chapman, a paralegal who works for Fathers United for Equal Justice, an Orange-based advocacy group for fathers and second wives. “But nobody tells them and they don’t know. I see about 120 guys a month who are just devastated by what’s happening to them.”

The bottom line in his case, Georgi Kozuharov contends, is that if his wife had sought work and sold the house two years ago, she would not be in such dire financial straits now.

“I asked her many times to start to look for a job and start to help the family,” he said. “But she never did anything and still doesn’t.”

Six months ago Georgi Kozuharov declared personal bankruptcy, he said.

The district attorney’s caseload is almost evenly divided between children, like the Kozuharovs’ daughter, who receive public assistance, and children who do not receive any county assistance but whose mothers have asked the district attorney’s office for help.

Children who do not receive county aid are eligible to collect any money the district attorney’s office can recover, which last year amounted to about $25 million. Children on public assistance receive the first $50 of a father’s payment. The rest reimburses the government.

All told, Orange County fathers owe about $100 million a year to children, about half of which the district attorney’s office successfully collects, Sturla said. Statewide, the amount owed is nearly $4 billion. Nationally, 23 million children are owed $34 billion.

Once the district attorney’s investigators locate a delinquent father and paternity is established, caseworkers from Sturla’s unit try to attach his wages.

Unlike the IRS, which prosecutes people for non-payment of taxes, the district attorney’s office does not use prosecution as a collection tool, Sturla said. Failing to pay child support is breach of a civil contract, not a criminal action.

About 1% of cases do result in criminal prosecutions of men who show criminal intent to avoid paying, by falsifying financial records or assuming new identities.

In Orange County, the delinquent caseload is soaring for a number of reasons, including the hard economic times of recent years and the unemployment or imprisonment of fathers and some mothers, Sturla said.

By state law, the office must investigate every case in which the parents are separated and the children receive any county aid, such as welfare, Medi-Cal, food stamps or foster care. Medi-Cal cases alone have resulted in 1,000 new cases each month, Sturla said.

While it is difficult to collect money from low-income men who have minimum-wage jobs, it can be just as difficult to recover payments from men who are self-employed and financially savvy, Sturla said. They sometimes evade support payments by handing over their businesses to partners, hiding their assets or shifting money to bank accounts in others’ names, he said.

“Self-employed men are among the hardest to get, because they simply alter their payroll and salaries to show that they are not making money,” Sturla said. “When you go after them, on paper they’re broke.”

Since 1993, Orange County has computed the amount of child support owed by a non-custodial parent with a software program called The Dissomaster.

The advent of the computer program came after a legislative decision to dramatically increase the amount of support non-custodial parents traditionally had to pay. The computer takes the parent’s salary and factors in adjustments for taxes and other costs to determine support payments.

The unyielding, impersonal support determinations are ones that many non-custodial parents have come to loathe.

“It just nails everybody too high,” said Robert Chandler, spokesman for the 5,000-member Coalition of Parent Support, an Anaheim-based group of men and women that formed to fight the changes. “It’s vindictive and ridiculous.”

Ed Schmerling said his child-support payments are the major burden in his life.

“I was divorced in 1990, and I had child support of $520 plus after-school day-care expenses of $200 a month,” he said. “Then, overnight, my payments go to $1,500 a month.”

Schmerling, a systems analyst, said he earns between $55,000 and $65,000 a year, “which means for every dollar I now make, 34 cents goes to taxes, 33 cents goes to my ex-wife and 33 cents goes in my pocket.

“Every day I wonder how long I can go on like this and why I continue working the way I do,” he said. “But I do it because I love my kids.”

Some cases involving well-to-do professionals can be more complex than welfare cases.

Christina Henrick and her ex-husband, Dr. Andrew Henrick, have been fighting over support issues since 1993. The result of their bitterness is Henrick vs. Henrick, four fat Manila folders in Orange County Superior Court that bulge with Christina Henrick’s efforts to collect support payments and her ex-husband’s efforts to have them reduced.

To date, Andrew Henrick, an ophthalmologist, is in arrears for about $20,000 in spousal support and $17,000 in child support, according to court documents. He has worked out a payment plan to make up the arrears and has not missed child support payments in recent months, both parties agree.

But for Christina Henrick, the plan came too late. She blames her ex-husband for allowing both her and their daughter to be evicted from their 7,800-square-foot San Clemente home.

“I don’t understand how men can do this without any feelings that they’ve done anything wrong,” she said.

But Andrew Henrick maintains he has done nothing wrong. He said he earns less than half what he did when the couple was married and fell behind in payments. But neither his wife nor the courts would agree to adjust his support order to reflect his reduced salary, he said.

“In 1994, there was a change in my income and I have tax returns to prove it,” he said. “But nobody seems to want to believe that, so I’m paying what I can. And yes, it is less than the court-ordered payment.”

In court documents, Andrew Henrick said his monthly salary is $10,000 and that the court-ordered $4,000 in spousal support and $2,075 in child support is too onerous. But in March the court’s final judgment determined that he earned $22,250 a month, mirroring a previous determination from December, 1994, and ordered him to pay.

Sturla and others concede, however, that in the end, there is really no way to make someone pay if he is determined to avoid it.

“There’s a hard core that is so angry and so bitter that even sending them to jail is not going to make them pay,” Sturla said. “They rationalize that it’s better to spend a year in county jail than to support their kids.

“It has to do with all those horrible, ugly human emotions that come out when people begin arguing over money and children and control,” he added. “The divorces I see have become very heated and vindictive, and people oftentimes set out to hurt and disable the other person purely because of hate and malice.”

In Marie Kozuharov’s case, the district attorney’s office has taken up where private attorneys left off because she is receiving welfare. To date, the county’s suit against Georgi Kozuharov amounts to a single sheet of paper that alleges he “has, and at all relevant times had, the ability to pay child support.”

Georgi Kozuharov says that just isn’t so.

“I talk to them and I beg them, but so far they don’t seem to understand,” Georgi Kozuharov said. “I don’t have that money.”

While angry that the district attorney has not made her husband pay up, Marie Kozuharov is half-convinced that no earthly power could wrest support from him.

“And you know, it’s not that he doesn’t love his daughter,” she said. “Because he does. He just hates me more.”

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

No Support

Orange County’s top 10 nonsupport offenders owe a total of more than $1.7 million. All are men who have escaped county efforts to locate or seize their assets. Nine of the 10 cases are being prepared for criminal charges or are being prosecuted. The lone exception has been convicted and is on probation. The district attorney’s office declined to release their full names. The list:

Name: Charles

Owes: $270,481

Children: Three in Mission Viejo

Disposition: Lives out of state

Name: Gary

Owes: $186,561

Children: Four in Buena Park

Disposition: Lives out of state

Name: Joe

Owes: $171,382

Children: Two in Midway City

Disposition: Referred for criminal prosecution