Overhaul of Child Support Unit Urged

More than 40 prominent attorneys, community leaders and child support activists called Monday for an immediate overhaul of Los Angeles County’s embattled child support collection program.

The appeal, sent to the Board of Supervisors and Dist. Atty. Gil Garcetti, follows last week’s series in The Times about numerous problems within Garcetti’s $100-million-a-year Bureau of Family Support Operations.

“We the undersigned believe that the district attorney’s office and the [Bureau of Family Support Operations] must be held accountable,” read the letter, which also was sent to state and federal legislators. “It is essential that major personnel changes be made in the top management levels of the bureau.”

Specifically, the letter urges a nationwide search for new management of the agency, which, with 500,000 cases, has a larger workload than that of 40 states. Candidates for management positions, the letter says, should have experience “in leading large customer-focused programs, preferably within a governmental agency.”

“Simply promoting into the top positions longtime deputies from within the agency will merely result in a prolonging of the current situation,” the letter says.

Alternatively, the letter asks that county officials turn over the largest component ofGarcetti’s child support program--welfare-related cases--to another government agency. More than

80% of its total caseload involves the collection of support for single-parent families receiving government assistance.

“Until now, there has been little outcry over the child support enforcement system from the greater public. Only Los Angeles’ less privileged have been aware of the magnitude of the bureau’s failures, and they have not been able to make their voices heard at election time,” the letter says.

A spokeswoman said Garcetti had yet to read the letter and could not comment until he did.

John Wallace, a spokesman for Supervisor Don Knabe, said recruiting top managers seemed a “reasonable request. . . . Something clearly is not working at the Bureau of Family Support.”

Since the 1970s, the district attorney’s office has run Los Angeles’ child support program to collect money for needy families and to reimburse taxpayers for welfare payments made to many of those households.

It is unclear what leeway the Board of Supervisors has to alter that program.

Wide Discretion Over Operation

As an elected official, Garcetti has broad discretion over the management of the operation. State law vests the responsibility for collecting delinquent child support with county district attorneys, and efforts to change those laws have been defeated in Sacramento.

Additionally, county code requires that the leader of the district attorney’s child support office be appointed from inside.

A recent position of second assistant bureau director, created in the wake of a scathing audit last year by Price-Waterhouse, was recently filled from the bureau’s ranks to the displeasure of child support advocates.

Those signing Monday’s letter included USC law professor Susan Estrich; Peg Yorkin, head of the Feminist Majority; attorneys Gloria Allred and Judith R. Forman; and Abbe Leibman, director of the California Women’s Law Center. The letter was initiated by the Harriet Buhai Center for Family Law, whose executive director, Betty Nordwind, is head of the county’s Family Support Advisory Board.

“This letter is one of the most important I have written since I came to the Harriet Buhai Center in 1987,” Nordwind wrote last week in seeking support.

Nordwind said that her activity was not on behalf of the county panel and that those signing the letter were speaking for themselves rather than their organizations.

In its series, The Times reported that the agency, despite a $55-million computer system and powers rivaling those of the IRS, was failing on several fronts to collect child support.

Based on numbers it provided to The Times and to the county panel formed to oversee its operation, Garcetti’s office does not collect currently due child support in more than nine out of 10 cases. And, The Times found, the agency goes after hundreds of men each month who are not the fathers, driving some into financial ruin.

“Since 1996, the D.A. has collected current child support for the half-million families in his caseload only 8% of the time, and for families on welfare, only 2%,” said Jenny Skoble, who heads the child support project for the Buhai Center. “Why bother having a program at all with this record?”

Strong Defense of Child Support Unit

Although Garcetti had no comment Monday, he has strongly defended the work of his child support unit in the past.

Last week, he told the supervisors in writing that the agency was improving rapidly. And in an interview with The Times before its series, Garcetti said he believes the agency is close to his goal of being “second to none in the nation.”

“I want our office to be viewed . . . as the Nordstrom of child support,” Garcetti said. “That we are the ones that do that quality job and never give up, and that we understand who the customer is.”

Monday’s letter suggests otherwise. “It is now apparent to a public beyond a small group of child support advocates that increased funding, new computer systems and additional staffing cannot address the bureau’s core problems,” said the letter.

“Nothing less than major change in every area and at every level of the bureau’s operations will put the agency out of its current morass.”