L.A Child-Support Office Ranks Last in State

Despite Dist. Atty. Gil Garcetti’s insistence that his child support office is improving, it remains the least effective such operation in California, according to a new numbers from the state’s nonpartisan Legislative Analyst’s Office.

This is the second year in a row the state has ranked its 58 child support units, charged with collecting money for families which are mostly on welfare. Once again Los Angeles comes in 58th in money collected per welfare case, even behind poorer counties such as Fresno.

Legal Aid attorney Jane Preece laughed when asked about the new ranking. “This is a surprise?” she asked following a meeting in which Garcetti’s staff admitted that a lack of coordination between them and other agencies delays payments to families getting off welfare. “Their office is still mismanaged and misrun.”

The rankings rely on 1998 data and do not cover the period since a Times series seven months ago spurred the office to make several reforms and search for new leadership, but child support advocates remain skeptical of those initiatives and say they have seen little improvement in the daily workings of the unit.

“It’ll be that way forever,” said Sue Speir, who runs an agency that helps parents deal with the office.

The Legislative Analyst’s report, released Tuesday, found that the regular explanations for poor performance--the size of the county or its poverty--actually have no effect on child support collections.

Still, the district attorney’s office Thursday contended that those factors do matter and are why it came in last. “Larger counties with huge welfare caseloads such as Los Angeles ... are the most difficult,” said spokeswoman Victoria Pipkin.

The Legislative Analyst’s office began ranking child support programs last year, after years of complaints that manipulation of numbers by local offices made it impossible to objectively determine their true performance.

Analysts avoided statistics most often touted by child support officials--the money collected--because it did not provide a full picture of the operation. Instead they compared the amount of money collected to the amount spent by the county on welfare, figures which could not be manipulated by district attorneys’ offices.

The prime determinant of the quality of a county’s program, the report found, is the money it spends on child support. The top-ranking county, Alpine, spent nearly six times as much as Los Angeles per welfare case.

Pipkin said that is why Garcetti’s office has hired more staff recently, after it left hundreds of positions vacant for years and used $6 million in money budgeted to child support to cover expenses by the criminal division.

Yet significant investments in a child support program is no guarantee of improvement, as Los Angeles’ experience shows.

The amount of money spent by the child support unit has skyrocketed over the past decade, but collections have not kept pace. The office last year collected $2.90 cents per dollar it spends on child support, virtually the same as in 1987, when it collected $2.87 per dollar spent.

Garcetti is seeking another $30 million for his child support unit in the coming year, which would bring its total cost to $150 million.

“If you are not well-organized and you are not using your resources well, more dollars does not help,” said Betty L. Nordwind, executive director of the Harriet Buhai Center for Family Law and chair of the county’s Family Support Advisory Board.

Nordwind cited as an example the discussion on welfare families. When a family is on welfare their child support money is sent to the state because they are already receiving public assistance. When the family is off welfare the child support money should come to them.

But child support advocates for years have complained that when families go off welfare they do not get child support. After requesting reports for month,s the Family Support Advisory Board Thursday heard representatives of the district attorney’s and welfare offices say that there often is a month’s delay because the funds are shuttling between the two agencies.

“These people are managers,” Nordwind said of the district attorney’s officials, complaining that no one had taken action for years. “We’re paying them in part to troubleshoot.”

California as a whole is considered one of the worst states in the nation for child support and the Legislative Analyst’s report found that the performance of large counties like Los Angeles drag down the rest of the state.

It recommended two methods of improving the situation, both of which have been perennial suggestions. The first is to strip district attorneys of the power to collect child support and place it in a state agency, an option embraced by some Democratic leaders in the Legislature this year.

The second option is to change the state’s arcane incentive funding structure to spur counties to spend more on child support. Since most child support money comes from the federal government, the report found, counties are reluctant to spend their own money.

Also on Thursday, Congresswoman Lynne Woolsey (D-CA) and Congressman Henry Hyde (D-Illinois) released a bill to turn child support collections over to the Internal Revenue Service, saying that the nationwide child support system has failed because it only collects money for one-fifth of its cases.