New report ranks L.A. County among worst in collections

Millions of deadbeat dads are getting off scot-free in California. Their children are owed a total of $5 billion. That would provide a lot of food, clothing, shelter and other necessities. There has got to be a better way to make irresponsible fathers, and mothers, pay up.

The state delegates this important, federally mandated job to county district attorneys, with mixed results. Los Angeles County, which is home to the bulk of California’s child support cases, ranks near the very bottom of the state’s counties on the basis of nearly every measure, according to a report released this week by the advocacy group Children Now. Orange County is not in much better shape.

Some of the frustrating delays and outright failures can be blamed on daunting demographic factors such as huge transient populations. The job is further complicated by paternity battles and not knowing who or where the fathers are. These pressures, though real, are not unique to Southern California. Alameda County, which includes heavily populated Oakland, and Fresno County, which includes a large migrant labor population, face similar problems but have much greater success rates. Clearly, there are some lessons to be learned from those counties.

Even so, no county has the sheer volume of cases that L.A. must manage. Currently, 730,000 child support cases are on the books; the district attorney’s office has failed to get court orders that would force payment on half a million cases. That’s unacceptable.

Los Angeles County’s 450 overwhelmed family support workers are saddled with a caseload of nearly 2,000 families. The county Board of Supervisors should double the number of these crucial workers or stop complaining about the results.

Staff members deserve credit for battling a $55-million computer system that initially hindered more than it helped. The balky system delivered little of the promised improvements, and at times made their jobs even harder by producing the wrong information. Managers now insist the computer has been fixed and cite as proof the 600,000 absent parents located in the first nine months of this fiscal year. But custodial parents who suffered because of not receiving checks for months at a time still have their doubts.

The L.A. family support officials in the district attorney’s office collected $175 million during the last fiscal year and hope to collect $200 million during the current year. That’s a pittance compared to what the office should be collecting. The D.A.’s office is quick to blame the Board of Supervisors and the sheer number of the cases it must handle, but that cannot excuse the lax management, inefficiency and history of problems that have hindered collections and hurt children.