Child-Support System Revised Changes Spurred By State Audit That Found Collection, Payment Errors

When state auditors checked up on the child-support debts that enforcement officials were pursuing, most of the debt figures were wrong.

That meant the state was dunning some parents for more than they owed, and others for less. Some families got more or less than they were due for support.

“We don’t mean they’re wrong by jillions of dollars, but even a thousand or two makes a difference,” said Idaho legislative audits supervisor Larry Kirk.

That audit finding and others - like the fact that caseloads for child-support enforcement workers had hit 900 cases per person - are driving changes in Idaho’s child-support enforcement system.

Previously fragmented, with no one directly in charge of the whole statewide program, child support has been consolidated into a single bureau, and about six weeks ago, Terri Meyer became its new chief.

She takes over a program that, despite its problems, has long ranked among the best in the nation for its success in collecting child-support payments.

Meyer, who has worked for the Health and Welfare Department’s Family and Community Services division for eight years and holds a master’s degree in counseling, attributes past successes to “purely the quality and the dedication of our work force.”

“They know the business that they do, and they desire to do it very, very well,” she said. “I really see my role as having a responsibility to allow them to do the things that they are good at, and give them the best opportunity and the most supports to be able to do that.”

At the same time, she’s overseeing significant changes in the system.

When it comes to keeping track of the debts absent parents owe, “We don’t deny that there are inaccuracies,” Meyer said.

Most are very small, she said. But the audit highlighted one case in which the amount owed by the absent parent was understated by $4,602, the amount to be distributed to the family was understated by $7,912 and the amount the department should keep to reimburse it for public assistance paid to the children while awaiting support payments was overstated by $3,310.

As a result, money that should have gone to the family had been kept by the department.

When legislative auditors randomly sampled 25 cases from three regions, they found that in 19 of them, or 76 percent, debt amounts were wrong. In at least four of those cases, the errors caused child-support payments that came in to the department to be distributed incorrectly.

The state handles two types of child-support cases, those where it simply receives the payments from one parent and distributes them to the other, and those where it has to actively seek out the absent parent, attaching wages or taking other steps to get the court-ordered payments to the children. There are more than 85,000 cases in the state’s system, totaling more than $350 million.

The errors came partly because workers anywhere in the state could adjust a debt amount, without oversight from a supervisor, the audit found.

“If you’ve got people doing that, later on if they’ve made an error, pretty quick it’s a jumbled-up mess,” Kirk said. “It’s not a simple system.”

The audit also found that the department wasn’t analyzing debts regularly, it wasn’t using technology to help with those analyses and workers weren’t adequately trained in the complex regulations, court procedures and other factors that can affect debt amounts.

“We think that the caseload is too high,” Kirk said. “That doesn’t mean they have to hire more people. Unless they train them, they might not do any better - they’d just have more people making mistakes.”

Meyer said, “We’re putting together a plan that is directly responsive to the recommendations that were made in the legislative audit.”

She’s working on a plan to create a special unit of financial experts to take over the debt-tracking. “It can get pretty intricate, so that it requires a high degree of expert ability to be able to do them accurately,” she said.

The audit also noted that federal law requires the department to advertise its services to the public, but the department didn’t do that from 1996 until this fall. “The department is hesitant to advertise since the current volume of cases is already overwhelming the existing organization and staff,” the audit said.

That’s changed now. A big advertising campaign kicked off this fall, including television ads featuring National Football League players talking about the importance of fatherhood. Radio ads also are in the works.

Ross Mason, Health and Welfare spokesman, said, “The idea behind the ads is that we get parents, and most of them are dads, to start making arrangements to pay their child support.”

Mason said that shouldn’t overwhelm the program, since the child-support cases already exist. Instead, it should help enforcement efforts along by persuading parents to contact the department and arrange to meet their obligations.

“We understand that there are those folks who just don’t want to make their child-support payments, but that’s not our whole population,” she said. “We are targeting our population that wants to be responsible, and can’t for whatever reasons, they’re not well-enough employed, they have a brand-new family with new children. They’re in a position where they’re unable, but desiring to meet their responsibilities.”

Meyer said she’s confident that Idaho’s child-support program can make the changes needed to fix the problems the audit identified. It’s solved several problems identified in an audit two years ago, including a glitch that saw some cases kept open, with notices sent to parents, long after the children had grown up and support no longer was needed.

Said Mason, “Things are changing pretty rapidly here.”

Kirk said, “If you talk to other state officials and federal officials, they’ll actually say that Idaho has a good system. They’ll say, `Yeah, it’s got a lot of problems, but when you compare it to some of the other states, it might even be one of the better ones.’ I hear that consistently.”