Garcetti Pledges to Implement Reforms

Dist. Atty. Gil Garcetti pledged Thursday to adopt “virtually every” one of the 20 reforms proposed by independent auditors, who found serious flaws in the county’s efforts to collect unpaid child support.

The audit found that the district attorney’s effort lags behind that of other California counties according to benchmark performance measures--such as collections, efficiency and operational effectiveness. In addition, it said, the system is hamstrung by too many managers, unresponsive employees and an automated phone system so abysmal that in one week of calls audited, only 1.6% of the 87,000 callers seeking information on their child support cases got through to a live operator.

Garcetti pledged to adopt the reforms the auditors--Price Waterhouse LLP--proposed to address those problems. But Garcetti said that will require as much as $7 million in additional annual funding from the Board of Supervisors so his office can hire as many as 300 employees.

“We are going to be talking about a very large sum of money. I know it, they know it,” he said, in reference to the supervisors.

One county supervisor said Garcetti’s promise to reform his office’s Bureau of Family Support Operations doesn’t go far enough.

An angry Supervisor Mike Antonovich said the audit, which was reported Thursday, confirms the Board of Supervisors’ need to force a dramatic overhaul of the district attorney’s approach to recovering the more than $1 billion owed to the county’s children by noncustodial parents.

Antonovich said he will introduce a motion Sept. 9--the board’s next meeting--urging consideration of privatizing the collection effort. He described the auditors’ findings as “a wake-up call,” adding that “the district attorney’s business-as-usual approaches to child support collection procedures are inadequate, are a failure.”

Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky was far more conciliatory. “I have encouraged the district attorney to look within his organization for savings and efficiencies before looking for new money from the board,” he said. “We need to make this system work and we need to make it a priority.”

Yaroslavsky would not comment on whether he would support privatization.

Supervisor Don Knabe said he wants to know why Garcetti needs more people so soon after the board gave him 200 additional employees to bolster the child support collection effort in 1995, especially because as many as 80 of those positions have not been filled. Garcetti says the pay is too low for him to recruit qualified staff.

Antonovich also made it clear he is not willing to support an increase in the district attorney’s budget. More than two years ago, the north Los Angeles County supervisor called a special hearing on problems in the county’s problem-plagued child support collection system, saying that his office was besieged with hundreds of calls from mothers not receiving their child support.

“We must do a better job to address and resolve” problems, the chief of the child support collections unit, Wayne Doss, said at the time.

On Thursday, Antonovich said the audit’s findings show that “simply throwing money is not the answer. We need to redesign the way the job is being done. . . . Bureaucratic double talk will not get the job done. It needs reform; radical reform.”

Antonovich said Garcetti needs to heed the auditors’ calls for a shift from an assembly-line approach to the hundreds of thousands of unresolved cases to one in which teams are responsible for an entire case from beginning to end.

He said the prosecutor also needs to follow another of the audit’s recommendations in setting clear benchmarks to measure the success of the entire operation and its discrete elements.

“We currently have none,” Antonovich said. “All we have are excuses, excuses and more excuses.

“Privatizing child support [collection] so we have people accountable is best,” the supervisor said.