Audit: State sloppy tracking child support

JEFFERSON CITY, Mo. -- State Auditor Susan Montee said Thursday that Missouri's child support enforcement office is fraught with sloppy record-keeping, meaning some noncustodial parents may not be as much of a deadbeat as the state claims.

But the miscalculations work both ways, she said. While some parents may not owe as much child support debt as the state says they do, others may actually owe more.

"It's extremely sloppy," Montee told reporters at a Capitol news conference. "It's a total inattention to making sure these numbers are right."

Montee expressed concern that some parents could have child support enforcement actions taken against them -- such as automatic deductions from their paychecks or the revocation of passports -- based on faulty information. But she cited no specific cases where that occurred.

The Department of Social Services, which oversees child support collections through its Family Support Division, said it has improved its accuracy in tracking owed money and suggested that the sample process used by the auditor's office was itself inaccurate.

"We find this audit report very misleading," said Family Support Division Director Janel Luck. "I'm not saying that we don't make mistakes. I'm saying it's way overstated in this audit."

When the state is slow in making adjustments to overdue child support, it's often because parents or out-of-state courts are slow to notify the state of changes, she said.

As of June 30, 2006, the state had 369,020 child support cases on its electronic management and tracking system, the audit said. About two-thirds of those cases -- or 240,453 -- showed a total of $2.2 billion in uncollected payments from noncustodial parents, the audit said.

The audit did not estimate what percentage of those total cases and dollar amounts were inaccurate.

Rather, auditors randomly examined 209 cases from a pool of 187,033 in which their arrears totaled more than $1,000. Auditors said they did not focus on cases with lesser debts because those typically were just a month or two behind.

Of those sample cases, the amount shown as owed was incorrect 27 percent of the time, the audit said. That included 35 cases in which the amount listed as owed was overstated by anywhere from $1 to $35,432 and 22 cases in which the amount shown as owed was understated by anywhere from $10 to $12,820, the audit said.

Applying the error rate from the sampling to the larger pool of 187,033 cases, the audit projected that about 51,000 cases could have errors.

In a written response released to the media, Social Services Director Deborah Scott asserted that by sampling only cases with at least $1,000 in debt, auditors looked at a disproportionate number of older cases which were more likely than newer cases to have errors in the outstanding balances.

"It seems to us to be skewed to be trying to find errors, or cases needing adjustment," Luck said.

Montee said the department's assumptions were incorrect, which is why Montee said she excluded that portion of the department's response from the audit she released.

Auditors also examined 35 cases with arrears of more than $100,000 and found that 22 of those had incorrect balances owed. Fourteen overstated the debt, including two that were off by about $454,000. Eight understated the debt, including one by $54,691, the audit said.

The department noted those cases amounted to less than one-tenth of a percent of the total.

All the errors that auditors found were corrected by the department, Montee said.

She described the mistakes as human errors, not computer malfunctions.

In some cases, court judgments setting or changing the amount owed by noncustodial parents had not been entered into the computer, either accurately or at all, the audit said. For example, a judge reduced a parent's debt from $309,000 to $84,347 in June 2006 but the change was not entered into the computer until January 2007 after auditors caught the error, the report said. In another case, an April 2003 judgment reducing a parent's debt was not entered into the computer by department staff until March 2007.

Other examples of errors included calculating a parent's obligation on a weekly instead of biweekly amount, which increased the supposed debt; failing to note when child support payments were to end, which resulted in the continued accumulation of alleged debt; and failing to reduce parents' debt when a 10-year statute of limitations prevented it from being collected.

Liberty attorney Larry Swall, who is chairman of The Missouri Bar's family law section, said the audit's findings aren't too surprising, considering the experiences of his own clients.

"I have rarely seen a situation that's come up for modification or collection (in court) when there isn't some mistake somewhere about arrearage, for various reasons," Swall said.

Swall pinned the problems not on state employees but on circumstances, such as when divorced parents agree a child can live with the previously noncustodial parent for a while without informing the state of the change.

Another problem, noted by Swall and the audit, is that when a child reaches adulthood, the department does not stop collecting judicially ordered child support without first receiving a court order to do so.

---

On the Net:

Auditor: http://www.auditor.mo.gov