County Defends Record on Child Support : Social services: At a hearing to address a flood of criticism, official cites recent efforts to improve collection--and promises to do better.

Responding to a torrent of criticism Monday from parents who say the county’s effort to enforce child support is among the worst in the state, the head of the Los Angeles County district attorney’s family support office defended recent improvements in the program, and promised to do better.

“The problems facing children in today’s single-parent families are severe,” Wayne Doss, director of the Bureau of Family Support Operations, said at an unusual hearing held to examine problems with the child-support system. “We must do a better job to address and resolve them.”

Using poster-size graphics and statistics to make his point, Doss told two county supervisors that his staff should be commended rather than criticized for its recent efforts. A new, $55-million computerized system, he said, will place Los Angeles at the forefront of the national effort to improve child-care collection efforts.

Doss said the family support bureau has struggled in recent months with automating its system of finding non-custodial parents and forcing them to pay child support, while at the same time bringing a deficient system into compliance with state and federal performance standards.

“I cannot emphasize too much the difficulties we faced in realizing the twin achievements of automation and program compliance in the same year,” Doss said. “All of us in the county can be extremely proud of the staff whose time and effort made this happen.”

But Doss clearly was advancing a minority view at Monday’s hearing.

In rapid succession, more than three dozen mothers and fathers described the system as a disaster that seems to get worse by the day.

“We have heard nothing but promises and promises and promises, but none of them are ever kept,” said Charleen Bonney, San Fernando Valley coordinator for the Assn. for Children for Enforcement of Support. “We are schmoozed and schmoozed and schmoozed, and nothing changes.”

The much-vaunted automation program that went on-line in February crashes frequently, spits out the wrong information, delays thousands of payments for months and even sends some payments to the wrong people, Bonney and others said.

Supervisor Mike Antonovich called for the meeting, citing a flood of complaints to his office. He was the lone supervisor to attend the entire meeting, accompanied at times by Supervisor Deane Dana.

Antonovich frequently expressed sympathy, at one point suggesting a one-stop center where custodial parents could go for information and to get complaints addressed. He said a that follow-up hearing would be held, and that the board would be looking into long-range solutions to the problems they outlined.

“I am sorry for the delays,” he said to one mother who said her child-support payments stopped years ago. To another, he said: “We are trying to improve the system . . . so that the cases we hear today are the last cases we hear.”

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Even with many improvements cited by Doss, the county effort still lags far behind most others. In the 1993-94 fiscal year, the latest available, Los Angeles County located just 6.9% of absentee parents--making its record the second-worst in California, according to the state Office of Child Support.

In mid-June, however, Dist. Atty. Gil Garcetti issued a news release saying his office had made dramatic improvements in the system, especially in locating absentee parents and collecting child-support payments. He said about 75,000 absentee parents had been located in the prior month, compared with 25,000 in all of the previous year.