Snags in Tracking Child Support

In 1991, the projected cost of a computerized child-support tracking system for California was $99 million. Not bad for a network that was supposed to bring the most populous state into compliance with federal mandates on deadbeat parents. The computers were going to provide seamless surveillance, help local governments force the slackers to pay up and thereby aid the state in reducing its welfare rolls.

By 1996, however, projected costs had soared to $260 million, and now the estimate is $300 million, with the system still installed in fewer than half of the state’s counties. A state Assembly committee report concluded that “it is unclear whether the project will ever fulfill the mandate of the federal government or the child support enforcement needs” of California.

California is by no means alone. Most states are way behind schedule and several million dollars over budget in developing child support tracking systems; 29 million children across America are still owed roughly $35 billion in support payments. All of this could have been predicted, and perhaps avoided.

The federal government first began pushing states to develop automated systems to improve child support collections in 1980. Push became demand with the 1988 Family Support Act, which required states to have tracking systems in place in seven years.

That deadline should have given federal legislators pause. Federal agencies had spent (wasted?) many billions of dollars, sometimes over the course of decades, in failed attempts to upgrade outdated computer systems. What possessed lawmakers to assume that 50 states could complete a task of equal if not greater difficulty in seven years, with a relative pittance ($1.5 billion) in federal funding?

In fact, states had made so little progress that the federal government pushed back its deadline from 1995 to 1997. As of February, just three of the 50 states (Washington, Virginia and Wyoming) had met all requirements. It was a far easier task in those states than in California. The city of Long Beach, for example, has nearly as many residents as Wyoming, and California has more than 2 1/2 times as many people as those three states combined.

But California should keep aiming for the payoff that a statewide and nationally linked system would bring. Aside from multi-state searches for deadbeats, for example, some states no doubt have developed solutions to problems that befuddle others and that information should be shared.

The federal government, meantime, can do a much better job in setting uniform guidelines for the states to follow, particularly since child support laws vary from state to state. The 1997 deadline is less important than developing child support tracking systems that meet reasonable goals in more than a handful of states. Better to move steadily forward than to fail altogether.