Systems Tracking Child Support
“Tracking ‘Deadbeats’: States Struggle With Deadline” (editorial, Aug. 5) highlights many of the challenges facing the federal and state governments in the child support enforcement program. It also spotlights some positive local news--record support collections in Los Angeles and Orange counties and the important action taken last week by the L.A. County Board of Supervisors to ensure that county employees and people who do business with the county will be accountable for their child support obligations.
There is additional good news here. Los Angeles County’s child support automation system, the largest system of its kind in the nation, has been up and running since February 1995. Your editorial noted that the rest of California and many other states are experiencing difficulties with their systems; it failed to note that this is not the case in L.A. County. Our child support automation system went online seven months before the original federal deadline.
Los Angeles County has the only criminal court in the nation devoted full-time to the prosecution of child support criminal cases. In the near future we will open two more civil courts and another criminal court. We also are adding and training staff and upgrading our customer service facilities.
The beneficiaries of this progress are the more than 750,000 children who are impacted by what we do in the district attorney’s office.
GIL GARCETTI
District Attorney
Los Angeles County
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