Still Far to Go on Child Support

One area in which the Orange County district attorney’s office has made notable progress in the past two years is collecting court-ordered child support payments. That’s also the area in which the office still has miles to go.

In the fiscal year 1995-96, the family support division in the district attorney’s office collected $65 million. In the 1997-98 fiscal year the office collected nearly $99 million. That’s the good news. The bad news is that the collections amount to only about 15% of the cases in which support is needed. The total of family support cases in Orange County now is a staggering 145,000.

There was a time when Orange County ranked near the bottom of the state’s 58 counties in ensuring that families, nearly always mothers and their children, received the money that courts ordered fathers to pay when a marriage or relationship ended. Last year a coalition of advocacy groups helped boost the county’s rank to 45th place.

That’s still a dismal record. Prodded by the Board of Supervisors, the district attorney’s office increased the staffing of its family support division. That lessened the impossibly high caseload imposed on investigators. In August, the division announced it would hire 32 more workers through a state-funded program.

The state funding represents a belated recognition in Sacramento that the collection system in California is not working well. The state long ago was supposed to have a computerized system to track who owes child-support money and how much is owed.

Sacramento also should consider not requiring each county to have the district attorney’s office do the collection. One possibility would be to have private firms collect the funds.

This is money that is owed to people, money a judge has determined should be paid. In many cases, the potential recipients are on welfare. The funds can make a dramatic impact on their lives. The state and the counties have to do a better job of seeing that they get the funds that are owed them.