State Audit Highly Critical of Child Support Collections

California’s child support program is in such disarray that the state has underestimated the amount of money that parents owe their children by $1.6 billion and has permitted wide differences in how laws are enforced, the state auditor’s office said Thursday in its first detailed look at the system.

“The child support enforcement program in California is disjointed, complicated and lacking in leadership,” declared the 150-page report. “Although no single entity is wholly responsible for the program’s failures, state, county and federal administrators have all contributed to its often inadequate performance.”

The missing $1.6 billion was a bookkeeping error that understated the severity of the child support debt to 3 million California children.

Bad statistics also hid problems in Los Angeles County. Auditors reported that the county’s child support office inflated its collection numbers by double-counting cases and, in one report, erroneously including 17,000 “nonexistent” cases with collections.

Auditors labeled this a misleading tactic that made the district attorney’s performance look better than it is. But aides to Los Angeles County Dist. Atty. Gil Garcetti said they were simply following state instructions.

At the same time, the state report praised Garcetti’s new telephone call processing center, which replaced a much-criticized system that allowed only 4% of callers to reach caseworkers.

The report also said that Los Angeles’ collections, like those across the state, have increased significantly over the past four years, which they partly attribute to the region’s economic recovery. Still, Los Angeles’ collections lag behind its own targets from four years ago.

The audit was released as the Legislature prepared for final votes on bills stripping child support programs from California’s district attorneys. Backers of the legislation expect the audit to add momentum to their drive, which is strenuously opposed by the state organization of district attorneys.

The report was most critical of the state Department of Social Services for its “laissez faire attitude” toward monitoring local agencies and their statistics, which the auditors described as riddled with errors.

Alarming Inaccuracy in the Numbers

The department oversight is so shoddy, the audit said, that the state has under-reported the amount of uncollected child support, as of last September, by almost $1.6 billion.

The amount is almost equal to the total child support collected last year and means that the counties’ collections systems are much worse than previously reported.

The report also blames poor state oversight partly on district attorneys who have fought to retain control over the operation at the county level. Prosecutors fail to follow parents when they move from county to county, creating as many as 60,000 duplicate files on parents with child support cases elsewhere, inflating the state’s caseload by 3%, the report said.

Auditors said that the way district attorneys interpret child support laws varies from one county to another.

“Simply based on where they live in California, one noncustodial parent may be prosecuted while another is educated about his or her responsibilities and assisted in fulfilling them,” said the audit. The report called that approach “unfair to the families who rely” on child support.

In its written response, the Department of Social Services said it agreed with most of the audit’s findings and recommendations.

The audit is silent on the most controversial issue in the legislative child support debate: whether prosecutors should keep the program.

But the auditors offered other proposals to improve the system, including a plan for “meaningful” performance measurement; improved reporting by counties; and assurance of equal treatment of parents by all counties.

A representative of the California District Attorneys Assn., which seeks to keep control of the program in the hands of prosecutors, said the group generally agreed with the audit, especially the need for tougher state oversight.

But Bill Otterbeck said he disagreed with the statement that prosecutors have hindered coordination of child support statewide. “We are being blamed for a lack of state leadership,” he said.

State Senate President Pro Tem John Burton (D-San Francisco) said the audit helps to prove prosecutors are to blame for many of the system’s failures.

“It shows [the program] has been screwed up because there is no statewide system,” said Burton, who wrote one of the bills to remove the program from district attorneys. “And there is no statewide system because the D.A.s have fought any intrusion into their domain.”

Legislators commissioned the audit in the wake of a Times investigation that found Los Angeles County’s child support system to be the worst in the state, failing to collect money in nine out of 10 cases and erroneously pursuing thousands of men for support.

The audit noted that district attorneys’ performance has improved recently but stated that “many county district attorneys must also take responsibility for not appropriately prioritizing their child support programs.”

In examining Los Angeles County, auditors deemed untrustworthy one key statistic often used by Garcetti in defense of his program: the number of cases in which his office is collecting money.

Auditors found that Los Angeles counts multiple payments on the same case as multiple paying cases.

“This duplicate reporting is inappropriate and misleading because it inflates the number of paying cases, thus exaggerating the county’s performance,” auditors wrote.

Furthermore, they added, the method prevented auditors from truly gauging the state’s overall collection rate because they feared it may be tainted by Los Angeles’ data.

L.A. County Takes a Hard-Line Approach

Auditors also found that Los Angeles County took a more adversarial stance toward debtor parents than other counties they examined, viewing those who fail to pay child support as “criminals.”

Garcetti’s office forces all parents to go through a confrontational court process rather than use more flexible methods such as administrative hearings and conferences, practices that Los Angeles deemed “an unnecessary use of resources,” the report states.

Garcetti’s top aides late Thursday said the office was following the state’s instructions by counting one case multiple times and that the auditors would have changed their report had they understood the program better.

Steven Buster, the new head of Garcetti’s child support unit, also differed with auditors’ characterization of his office as adversarial. He said the unit is expanding its outreach efforts and is sensitive to the needs of debtor parents, but added, “This is an audit of a child support enforcement program. . . . It’s in the district attorney’s office for a reason.”

The audit also accused the federal government of shoddy record-keeping and questioned whether all child support due is collectible.

The audit noted that California sets child support at higher levels than the rest of the nation, especially on welfare cases, and has a higher level of welfare cases, in which debtors traditionally have less ability to pay. Yet because of the poor record-keeping, auditors found no reliable assessment of parents’ ability to pay the support for which they were billed.

Although legislators had asked that auditors probe how the district attorneys spend the more than $400 million in federal funds they use to collect child support, the report did not address that issue.

The report echoed previous analyses of the state’s beleaguered child support system by the nonpartisan Little Hoover Commission and the legislative analyst’s office, and advocates Thursday said it was yet another vindication of their long-held beliefs that major reform is needed.

“It’s not just the advocates who are saying this,” said Nora O’Brien, state director of the Assn. for Children for Enforcement of Support.

Added Leora Gershenzon of the National Center for Youth Law: “This should be the nail in the coffin for the district attorneys and the Department of Social Services if things are decided by policy, not politics.”

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Little Child Support

Although California’s collections have increased, uncollected child support remains significant.

In billions

1994-1995

Owed: $8.9

Collected: $.9

1995-1996

Owed: $10.3

Collected: $.9

1996-1997

Owed: $11.6

Collected: $1.1

1997-1998

Owed: $13.8

Collected: $2.0

Note: The California state auditor adjusted the amounts for all years because of errors in calculation of past-due child support.

Sources: Federal Annual Child Support Enforcement reports, California’s Child Support Enforcement Program annual reports.