Reformed Child Support System Termed a Success

Two years after California overhauled its beleaguered child support system, state officials and advocates said Friday that the new program has exceeded expectations in collecting money for single-parent families.

With a record $2 billion a year now collected from parents ordered to pay child support, the new state Department of Child Support Services has more than doubled the average amount brought in per case, from $419 in fiscal 1996 to $1,015 in 2000, officials said. The 2001 figures are not yet available.

Just as important, they said, the new department has increased the number of cases in which paternity has been established in court, expanded the number of children covered by health insurance and enhanced the customer services that just a few years ago were a constant source of controversy.

“For the first time in the history of California, child support enforcement embraces the idea of customer service,” said Melanie Snider, a director of the Assn. for Children for Enforcement of Support, a national advocacy group.

Snider was among the child support advocates and state officials in Sacramento on Friday to mark the two-year anniversary of the new child support department, launched after years of complaints to the Legislature about the performance of California counties on the issue.

Before the department was created, district attorneys were responsible for running the child support agencies in all 58 counties and did so with varying degrees of success. But the lack of uniform regulations and poor overall performance--exemplified by a still poor collection record in Los Angeles County--led lawmakers to transform the way the state handles child support.

Lawmakers stripped control of the local programs from prosecutors and established new statewide performance standards, with an emphasis on collecting current support, rather than past due amounts, to help keep single-parent families intact and off public assistance.

“This is an example where a deeply entrenched bureaucracy can be changed and changed for the better,” said Lenny Goldberg of the National Center for Youth Law at a news conference in Sacramento.

One result has been that about two-thirds of the state’s current cases involve families that are not on welfare--a reversal of what state officials were reporting several years ago.

“What that means is that about two-thirds of the $2 billion [in collections] is going directly to families,” instead of repaying county welfare systems, said Curtis L. Child, director of the state child support department. “So the magnitude of that number is important in looking at a program that is directed at family self-sufficiency.”

In addition, he said, his department has saved the state more than $4 million by eliminating some local administrative costs.

The department has plowed savings into better customer service, including the addition of local ombudsmen throughout California to respond to complaints about local programs, he said.

The reorganization has helped to foster a new level of cooperation between child support advocates, fathers’ rights groups and others in handling the thorny issue of child support collections, he said.

Said Assemblywoman Dion Aroner (D-Berkeley): “This is one of the few times when we get to look at a reform package and see the accomplishments come to fruition in such a short period of time.”

The report was issued at the same time state officials released the results of a performance analysis of Los Angeles County’s long-troubled child support collection program.

The analysis, by Denver-based Policy Studies Inc., concludes that the county’s program has increased the amount collected from $212 million in 1997 to $425 million last year.

The report says the county has achieved an “impressive rate” of compliance with federal deadlines for child support cases, an indication that it is meeting deadlines for such actions as establishing paternity and obtaining court orders for collections.

But the study also found that the county’s collection rate for current support was only 32%, “very low” compared with the state and nation. The latest state figures show that collections on current support in California averaged 44%, while nationwide the figure was 56%.

The county’s performance in other key areas has also been poor.

For example, the report found, Los Angeles County has an “extraordinarily high” rate of court orders obtained by default--79%--because those sued for child support fail, for whatever reasons, to appear in court. That default rate, the report says, not only raises serious questions about the fairness of the county’s approach, but also gives the court orders for child support “less credibility and makes them harder to enforce.”