Child Support Penalty

California’s custodial parents must be wondering who they can turn to for help with unpaid child support.

The county district attorney’s offices around the state? No. They run the current system in which four out of every five eligible families collect no child support at all. There is a backlog of $8 billion in unpaid support.

How about the state government, especially since there is a bill afoot in the Legislature to wrest control from the district attorneys? There’s not much comfort there. It’s the state that has tried and failed for nine years to create a California-wide computer system to better track deadbeat parents and collect more support payments. The first effort to meet a 1997 federal deadline for that computer system ended in failure and recriminations that year as the system was scrapped before it was completed, with $171 million down the drain.

More recently came the mind-boggling $1.3-billion plan-B computer system that child support advocates had warned would be too expensive and inefficient. The district attorneys thought that one up and the Legislature supported it, but the federal government said the plan was--yes--too expensive, inefficient and unacceptable.

California’s chief legislative officer has two ideas: State takeover or a plan to offer financial incentives for local governments to spend more on collection efforts per case.

What’s needed now is a fresh set of eyes on the problem, starting with Gov. Gray Davis, and a plan that does more than simply shift the burden from the counties to the state. In the meantime, the state is being penalized with federal funds withheld--a punishment felt by needy California families, not by the bureaucrats who have failed them. Welfare reform’s limits on assistance payments have also intensified the need to collect child support.

Too bad someone can’t divert the state payroll and hide it somewhere for awhile. Then state officials might have a sense of what the custodial parents of 3 million California children feel every time the check doesn’t come. Then something would get done.