County’s Child-Support Collection Deficiencies Could Be Costly to State

Los Angeles County’s continuing deficiencies in child-support collections threaten to cost California tens of millions of dollars in federal funds, state officials told a county panel Thursday.

Just days before the Board of Supervisors selects the head of a new county agency on child support, two top officials of the state’s Department of Child Support Services said the county’s performance in everything from establishing court orders to collecting money lags far behind the rest of California.

Without Los Angeles County, in fact, California would meet the federal thresholds for child-support programs, said Linda Patterson, manager of the state agency’s performance evaluation and analysis section.

As such, state officials told the county’s Family Support Advisory Board that improving the county’s performance--and quickly--is critical to California.

“It’s clear that we have some work ahead,” Patterson said, “because as Los Angeles goes, so goes California.”

A report presented to the county panel shows for the first two quarters of this fiscal year, Los Angeles County lagged 8% to 10% behind the statewide average in four categories used by the federal government to assess each state’s performance for funding.

L.A. County, for instance, had current collections on about 31.5% of its cases, compared with just over 40% for the state. Also, Patterson said, the state’s performance rate in various categories could rise as much as an additional 10% if L.A. County’s performance is excluded from the statewide total.

State officials say California already faces the loss of $8 million in federal funds because its child-support collections for last fiscal year fell below the minimum standards established by the federal government. An additional $72 million to $144 million in welfare reimbursements could be jeopardized if Los Angeles County--and, consequently, the state--does not improve its child-support performance in several categories, they say.

“It’s critical,” said Curtis Howard, assistant deputy director of the state child-support department. “Without L.A. succeeding, we are in big danger.”

To improve the county’s performance, the state has hired Denver-based Policy Studies Inc. to conduct a management review that will span three months and begin within weeks. The $250,000 study will coincide with the transfer of Los Angeles County’s program from the district attorney’s Bureau of Family Support to a new county Department of Child Support.

The transfer is a part of an overhaul of California’s child-support program prompted by years of poor performance by many district attorneys. In L.A. County alone, state officials said, the transfer will result in a cost savings of $1.3 million in administrative overhead--money that will now be put back into child-support programs.

In anticipation of the new department, county officials have narrowed the choices for a director. The five finalists are Wayne Doss, current head of the district attorney’s child-support program; Philip Browning, head of the child-support enforcement program in Washington, D.C.; Rosmarie Day, director of the Massachusetts child-support program; Teresa Lynn Kaiser, administrator of Maryland’s child-support agency; and Meg Sollenberger, director of the child-support program for the state of Washington.