Child Support Heat Put On Wrong Fathers Erroneous Warnings Sent To More Than 1,400 Dads

More than 1,400 fathers being hit up for child support by the state of Idaho last spring didn’t owe anything.

Those cases should have been closed, for reasons ranging from the dads having died to the kids having grown up. But they weren’t - and the parents continued to get bills and warnings from the state about delinquent payments.

State officials say they’ve fixed the problem, which turned up in a legislative audit of the Health and Welfare Department. But in the process of fixing it, Health and Welfare also discovered 10 percent of its child support cases - about 7,000 cases - should have been closed.

“There are some significant findings here that trouble me,” said Karl Kurtz, state Health and Welfare director, who reported to the Legislature’s budget committee last week in response to the audit. “You have my word that we are in the process of evaluating each and every one of them and making some substantial changes.”

The child-support glitch is a blemish on the record of the state’s highly rated child support enforcement program. The program had collected $77.2 million in less than a year as of Aug. 1, exceeding a federal goal for the state by 21 percent.

Child support consists of payments that courts order the noncustodial parent to pay, usually after a divorce. The parent who is raising the children receives the money for their care. Health and Welfare is in the middle, tracking, receiving and sending out the payments.

The state has identified unpaid child support as the No. 1 reason families go on welfare in Idaho. That’s why more focus was put on child support enforcement in Idaho’s welfare reform plan, with parents who don’t pay up facing such sanctions as suspension of their driver’s licenses.

In the cases that should have been closed, some innocent parents may have been threatened with license suspension, but none of their licenses was taken.

“Fortunately, the procedure we set up for license suspension is very worker intensive,” said Tamara Prisock, child support project manager for the state. “That initial notification process may have started out, but the actual license would never have been suspended.”

If any parents paid bills they didn’t owe, they’ll be refunded, Prisock said.

The problem developed because of a switch to a new automated system in 1996, Prisock said. The child support files were correct before they were changed over, and the new system was functioning correctly. But the conversion threw off some of the data, and child support workers preoccupied with the big changes that accompanied welfare reform didn’t notice.

“Sort of when the dust settled, we found this problem,” Prisock said. “We immediately implemented a massive, statewide cleanup effort.”

From March to July, child support workers across the state checked every file, comparing the court order and other records to what the computer system said. That check turned up the 7,000 problem cases.

“We touched every case that we had,” Prisock said.

Because the computer didn’t think the cases were closed, it kept tallying up monthly payments and past-due amounts, and automatically sending the parents bills and delinquency notices.

“Inappropriate correspondence was going out to parents,” Prisock said. “As the `debt’ continued to accrue, it would have an increased arrearage from month to month.”

Complaints poured in to Health and Welfare offices.

“That clued us in to the fact that we had a pretty big problem,” Prisock said.

Just a few years ago, Idaho was rated one of the top five states in the nation for recovering child support from nonpayers whose families had been forced onto welfare.

State Sen. Gordon Crow, R-Hayden, who serves on the Senate Health and Welfare Committee, said he receives a couple of dozen calls every year from constituents who are unhappy with Idaho’s child support enforcement program. But in every case he investigated, it turned out that the parent really did need to pay up. “Some of them were paperwork foul-ups or things like that,” Crow said.

Crow said he was glad to hear that Health and Welfare had fixed the problem. “I wish it wouldn’t have cropped up to start with,” he said. “Hopefully, we’ll learn from this and the department won’t fall into this again when they change computer systems.”

Health and Welfare just recently took the first preliminary steps toward replacing the huge computer system that runs all the state’s benefit programs, including Medicaid, food stamps and welfare. The changeover is still several years away.

According to a national survey cited in a recent memo to agencies from state budget officials, only 9 percent of new information system projects in large organizations are completed successfully, 61.5 percent face challenges such as missing features and going over budget, and 29.5 percent are eventually canceled.

Idaho’s legislative services office and the governor’s office are starting a new “risk assessment” program to look at big computer changeovers, in an attempt to prevent big problems.

“Technology will be changing rapidly over the next several decades,” Crow said. “We have to take care of those computer glitches, and anticipate them better than we have.”