Board OKs Contracts to Aid Child Support Unit

Sixteen months after pledging to use private companies to help locate parents who either are owed or are behind on their child support, the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office Tuesday won approval of two $418,000 contracts to supplement its own $150-million operation.

For five months, county supervisors--particularly Mike Antonovich, a political opponent of Dist. Atty. Gil Garcetti--have been urging the prosecutor’s office to produce the contracts for board approval. But the district attorney’s office, acting on the advice of county lawyers, said state approval was required.

That was not the case, and on Tuesday the board gave its formal approval to the contracts, which can each be extended for two years for an additional $836,000.

Antonovich on Tuesday again complained about the length of time it took the contracts to come before the board, saying that it may have caused parents to go without money for months. “On four separate occasions over the past five months your office has stated the contract was ready,” he told Wayne Doss, the director of the district attorney’s child support unit.

Doss said the contracts were processed as swiftly as possible.

One contract is with Lockheed IMS, the company that designed the county’s often-criticized $55-million child support computer system, which has been unable to find many parents. Twenty-four Lockheed employees who live out of state have given $17,000 to Garcetti’s reelection campaign, with most contributions coming before the prosecutor’s office recommended a $2-million boost in the company’s existing child support contract last summer.

Doss said Lockheed was chosen for the latest contract after a formal bidding process because it has access to private databases that government computers cannot reach. The county’s chief information office concurred with the district attorney’s findings.

Lockheed and the other company, SCB Technology Resources, will split those child support cases in which the district attorney’s office is unable to find the debtor parent or, in rarer cases, the parent who is owed child support. If they find the parents in their databases, the private companies will send the information back to the district attorney’s office, Doss said.

Doss predicted that about half of the more than 100,000 individuals for whom the contractors will search annually will be impossible to locate. Still, he said, “this will make a dent in it.”

The awarding of the contracts follows a pilot project in which private databases were used to search for parents whose child support the office had collected. District attorney officials said that project has helped them reduce the amount of money their office has held, from $18 million last fall to about $6 million today.

But the office says that while it has detailed records on individual cases, it cannot provide accounts of how much of that money went to parents. A sample of cases in December, Doss said, found that 58% of the money distributed went to parents to whom support was owed, 8% was returned to the parents who paid and the rest went mostly to repay the welfare office.

The move toward increased use of private companies to find parents was sparked by a 1998 Times series on the child support office that found that it was ranked the worst in the state, failing to collect money in nine of 10 cases. In some cases in which the district attorney’s office said it could not find parents to give them their child support, Times reporters were able to locate those owed money.

Steve Buster, who was hired as the chief operating officer of the child support office several months after The Times’ series was published, said Tuesday that many of the unit’s statistics have improved in the past year.