Problem-Plagued Computer System Still Bugging D.A.

Five months after Dist. Atty. Michael Bradbury got permission to replace it, the county’s child support computer system--plagued by thousands of bugs and reliable mostly for making errors--is still in place.

The replacement system will not be ready until early December, officials say, forcing the county to track some cases by hand when a major policy change rolls around in three weeks.

The policy change, perhaps the biggest to hit the child support program since the disastrous state computer program by Lockheed was implemented last year, will eventually cover most of the county’s welfare recipients.

Currently, families that receive child support must turn most of those payments over to the state while they are on welfare. And if the family receives any overdue child support after leaving public assistance, the state usually takes enough money needed to recover the payments it has made.

Under the new rule, families that enter and subsequently leave the welfare system after Oct. 1 will not have any subsequent overdue child support payments reduced to reimburse the state.

For instance, if an absent parent who owes several months of back child support makes a large payment after the family leaves the system, the family is expected to receive all the money.

The new policy will not affect the approximately 7,500 families that now receive welfare benefits. Future payments to them will still be reduced by the amount the state is owed.

Nearly 80% of the county’s welfare recipients eventually secure court orders for child support payments. Although only about 22% of those orders are paid, officials say such payments are vital to keep families off welfare rolls.

Stan Trom, director of the Child Support Division in the district attorney’s office, said the faulty computer system will not keep authorities from tracking cases that might be affected by the new rules. Instead, he said, his office will use logs and printouts to supplement the current system.

While the two-month transition to a new computer system will create some additional paperwork in certain cases, Chief Deputy Dist. Atty. Greg Totten said the county is moving as quickly as it can to implement the KIDZ system now being used by Kern County.

“It takes awhile to build a child support system,” he said. “They track everything from the cases to all the enforcement activity we engage in. They also track the accounting of the case.”

Totten said the old system, expected to be replaced by Dec. 1, was slow, antiquated and “very bad.”

“We don’t have confidence in the balances the system shows,” he said. “We’ve had instances where $20,000 in balances have just disappeared from the system.”

Child support workers, however, have developed special “work-arounds” to bypass the system’s many flaws, and Totten said the two-month delay between policy changes and a new computer system should not affect services.