Angry Parents Assail Child Support System

Seething parents vented their anger at Dist. Atty. Gil Garcetti’s child support office at a public hearing Thursday while businessmen said they could help the troubled agency to do a better job.

A handful of employees in Garcetti’s unit took the microphone to defend their office but were drowned out by a steady parade of mothers and fathers.

“This operation is woefully inept,” said Calvin Ray Murphy, who said that for 16 months he has received bills intended for another man with the same name.

In ugly coincidence, the most recent bill, for $71,000, came on the day his father died, Murphy said, choking back tears.

“You people are evil,” he said as he turned to face child support director Wayne Doss, seated a few feet away. “You,” he told Doss, “should feel deeply ashamed of yourself.”

The emotional, three-hour hearing, which drew a crowd of about 100, was sponsored by Supervisor Mike Antonovich, a staunch advocate of privatization.

“What we’re looking at is having a system that works,” he said. “It’s broken today.” Although the stated purpose was to allow parents to tell their stories, the hearing also brought out tensions over the nascent effort to contract out parts of Garcetti’s operation to businesses that specialize in collections.

Union members who work in the child support unit wore stickers reading “Real Solutions, Not More Politics,” but Antonovich did not allow some to testify. He said afterward that parents deserved the bulk of the time.

In a prepared statement, the union cautioned that there is no “magic bullet” to fix the problem and said the office has been improving. “This isn’t an office that has been standing still,” said Bart Dina, assistant general manager of the Service Employees International Union, Local 660.

Dina said the union would not oppose using a private agency to supplement the district attorney’s work “if they have something to offer that can’t be done within the county, with proper management and proper tools for our workers--including a computer system that works better.”

The hearing, which the district attorney did not attend, served as a prelude to Tuesday’s board meeting at which Garcetti is scheduled to answer demands that he improve his agency’s child support record.

The demands come on the heels of a series by The Times that showed that the district attorney’s office fails to collect child support in nine out of 10 cases, erroneously bills thousands of men a year and holds millions of dollars of payments because it says it cannot find the rightful parents.

Although in attendance throughout the hearing, Garcetti’s spokeswoman, Victoria Pipkin, declined to reveal any aspects of the district attorney’s plan.

And after enduring hours of attacks at the hearing, Doss, who runs the $120-million program, said he had been directed to refer all questions to Pipkin.

The Board of Supervisors already has launched a pilot project to allow private vendors to test their performance with a sample of active and inactive child support cases. The argument for privatization got a boost from testimony by Mel Shaw, president of a USCB Inc., a private collection company.

Shaw, one of several businessmen to address the hearing, said that 10 years ago his office, in a test program, found 47% of the parents the child support unit could not, and he suggested that private vendors could work the 240,000-plus cases Garcetti’s office has declared uncollectable and closed.

A “marriage” between the county and private sector, Shaw said, could boost performance without costing county jobs.

“We’re going to make them look better,” Shaw said, “because we’re going to relieve them from the work they’re not doing.”

Most of the hearing, however, was dedicated to parents’ heated complaints about the child support unit.

Mothers told of waiting for urgently needed support. Fathers told of being wrongly accused, of wildly fluctuating billing statements and of the district attorney’s office holding overpayments while taking more money.

Fathers’ rights groups called for reforms in family law overall. One father ended up shouting and cursing; other parents spoke in trembling tones about years of frustration and pending evictions.

Rhonda Sanchez cradled her 11-month-old son as she told how her current husband has been pushed to financial ruin for child support while her ex-husband’s child support has been lost in the district attorney’s bureaucratic maze. “I am sort of caught in the middle,” she said.

“Something has to happen,” said Connie Blackwell, who said she has struggled for years to get child support. “This is a system that is bankrupt.”

Although critics of the district attorney’s office far outnumbered its defenders, a few single mothers praised the child support program for providing them badly needed aid.

“If it wasn’t for the district attorney’s office’s diligence, I would just be another statistic on the streets,” said Iris Lastre, who credited the agency with helping her collect $750 in monthly support for her two children.

And some of the two dozen attorneys and caseworkers attending the hearing also defended their work.

“We try to provide the best service we can for the children,” said family support representative Sarah Gonzalez.