And the Kids Pay the Price

For nine years now, bunglers in Sacramento and Washington have collectively jeopardized the well-being of millions of poor California children who are owed child support payments. Those children and their custodial parents figure to lose big because of $4 billion in outlandish federal penalties.

As of Dec. 31, the state will be officially out of compliance with a federal mandate to computerize child support data. Washington has threatened to withdraw $240 million earmarked for the computer project itself. But far more harmful, a block grant of $3.7 billion for temporary aid to needy families, such as mothers and children without child support, may be lost because of the state’s inability to develop a statewide, automated child support tracking system.

This is the unanticipated result of the federal Family Support Act of 1988, a law that was meant to help children, not penalize them. Now, congressional action is needed to preserve benefits for these youngsters.

There’s plenty of blame to spread around. Early on, the Californians in Congress should have pointed out that the state would need much more time, but they didn’t. The ammunition clearly was at hand: California has more child support cases than the next two most populous states combined.

Federal officials were three years late in promulgating guidelines. Their absurd suggestion to California was to emulate New Hamp- shire’s statewide system. New Hampshire has fewer residents than the San Fernando Valley and fewer than 45,000 support cases. California has nearly 2.4 million cases.

Part of the irony is that federal officials recognized that Los Angeles County’s child support caseload was so huge it deserved to have its own computer system, separate from the rest of the state. That has resulted in a system that works well for Los Angeles. The state, because of its own enormous caseload, should have been given some special consideration as well, along with more time to get a system in place.

Meanwhile, state officials doggedly pursued a computer system designed by Lockheed-Martin IMS that simply did not meet California’s needs. State officials didn’t drop the project until this month, a year or more later than they should have.

California has rightly, if belatedly, decided to work on another computer system. Perhaps as many as two or three regional computer systems will be required to handle the caseload. Now, congressional action is required to give California and as many as 16 other states more time and/or to reduce the scope of the federal penalties faced by each. Both are warranted. Children should not be punished for the ineptitude of so many of their elders.