To Deadbeat-Dad Squad, Guilty Until Proved Innocent

Peggy Gill of Santa Ana got the mail one day in mid-January and came back with a question for her 60-year-old husband, Jim:

“Uh, is there something you’d like to tell me?”

Like, how to explain the letter from the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office saying that he owed $71,968.61 in back child support?

The Gills shared a laugh over the letter: They had been married for 36 years and had a 34-year-old son and twin 31-year-olds. Not to mention the fact that Jim had a vasectomy not long after the twins were born. Amused, they left the next day for an anniversary cruise to the Panama Canal.

“It was so obviously a mistake, I made light of it,” Jim says of the letter.

Wrong.

Little did the Gills know they were diving into the maw of one of the most notoriously inept bureaucracies around. As The Times reported last year, the state’s legislative analyst rated the L.A. County family-support operation the least effective in the state.

As soon as they returned to Orange County, around Feb. 1, Gill faxed his Social Security and driver’s license numbers to the agency. It said it couldn’t read them, so he faxed them again, without success. He says he tried again the next day, but the fax didn’t go through. When he phoned, someone at the agency said it had changed its fax number overnight. Again, Gill faxed the information.

Later that month, Gill received his second deadbeat dad notice.

In mid-March, Gill said, he talked to someone in the agency’s “mistaken identity” department. “You know you’re in trouble,” he said, “when they have an entire department devoted to mistaken identity.”

He said a woman in the department assured him they knew he wasn’t the deadbeat James Gill and would so notify him by mail.

Instead, Gill said, he got a letter from the agency two weeks later saying, “This office has been advised that you are the parent of a minor child for whom the district attorney is required to establish, modify or enforce child support . . . “

And that wasn’t all: The agency informed the Gills that a lien had been placed upon their house.

Angry and frustrated, Gill phoned the agency again. He said he talked to a young man who cautioned him against getting too agitated.

Gill conceded he was uncomplimentary to the agency but not personally offensive. “The young man said if I insisted on getting excited, he was going to hang up on me,” Gill said. “I said, ‘If you’re going to hang up on me, then give me your name.’ As soon as I said that, he hung up on me.”

All the stress wasn’t helping Gill, a former aerospace worker on permanent disability with Parkinson’s disease. With the lien attached, Peggy Gill said, “We didn’t know if we’d come home and find chains and locks on the door and dogs in the house.”

Gill said he followed up his angry phone call with a letter that, this time, included his birth certificate and marriage license. That was about 10 days ago. Since then, he told me Tuesday morning when we talked, he’d had no further correspondence.

I contacted Mike Botula, who had the tough task of defending the L.A. child-support office.

“We have at the moment 533,000 cases,” he said, “so it’s a huge number of cases we’re dealing with in L.A. County.”

When the agency identifies a deadbeat dad, Botula said, it sends the name to the state and a “parent locator service” goes to work.

Unfortunately, Botula conceded, the wrong person is sometimes identified. And, he conceded, the agency’s investigative and coercive techniques are “triggered” even before identification is confirmed. He acknowledged that, in Gill’s case, the agency never had anything more than the name, “James Gill,” to go on.

“The real Mr. Gill,” Botula said, “is a resident of Michigan. At one point, the system lost track of him.” The name then went into a nationwide search “and found your Mr. Gill’s name in Santa Ana, and that’s what triggered the notice.”

Over the phone, Botula sounded like a nice guy, but I wonder if he knows how incredulous it sounds that the Gills went through all this just because he has the name “James Gill.”

Botula said he did. “We’re well aware of the anxiety factor involved and the emotional impact it has on people,” he said.

That’s why, Botula hastened to add, the bureau’s improved computer system quickly identifies mistakes and corrects them. When Gill’s last letter arrived earlier this month, Botula said, the agency began corrective procedures.

Botula said the Gills have heard the last from the child-support agency. He said he wanted to use the opportunity to publicly apologize to the Gills.

Coincidentally, no more than 10 minutes before finishing up with Botula late Tuesday afternoon, I spoke again to Gill. Since our morning conversation, the mail had arrived.

“We got the April bill today,” he said.

The new total, with interest accruing: $72,784.28.

Only a bureaucracy like L.A. family support could make a guy happy to have Parkinson’s.

“I’ve only got Parkinson’s,” Gill said. “If a guy had a weak heart, this could really get to you.”

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Dana Parsons’ column appears Wednesday, Friday and Sunday. Readers may reach Parsons by calling (714) 966-7821 or by writing to him at the Times Orange County Edition, 1375 Sunflower Ave., Costa Mesa, CA 92626, or by e-mail to: dana.parsons@latimes.com