Two-thirds of child support overpayment recovered

JEFFERSON CITY, Mo. -- Attorney General Jay Nixon is considering whether to sue a state contractor because of a $1.2 million overpayment of child support checks late last year.

The state child support office has recovered about two-thirds of the money errantly paid to custodial parents over the Thanksgiving holiday.

Nixon's office is investigating how the error occurred, who is at fault and how the state can recover the rest of the money, spokesman Scott Holste said Thursday.

"Our goal is to make sure that the state is made whole, that we get the money," he said.

State child support officials previously had cast responsibility on a contractor, and on Thursday provided a document to The Associated Press that again pinpoints the error on a contractor employee.

But state Rep. Quincy Troupe, whose committee oversees funding for the child support office, is largely blaming the state. Put bluntly, "the state was asleep at the switch," said Troupe, D-St. Louis.

Accounts from others close to the process cite a lack of communication and a change in state personnel as possible contributing factors to the mistake.

During the extended Thanksgiving holiday, 7,505 child support checks were double-issued, resulting in the $1.2 million overpayment.

Since then, the state has recovered $802,003 through reversing electronic deposits, voluntary repayments and withholding cash intended to go to parents for overdue child support, said state child support director Gary Bailey.

The state expects to recover only part of the remaining $402,385.

Child support payments are collected from noncustodial parents by Systems and Methods Inc., a Carrollton, Ga.-based company under contract with the state.

The state Division of Child Support Enforcement then provides a list of daily payments for custodial parents to SMI, which directs Jefferson City-based Central Bank to cut the checks.

Over the Thanksgiving holiday, the state did not supply a new payment list at its typical time. But SMI, thinking the state had done so, re-sent the previous day's list to the bank, resulting in a double-payment.

"This is where the error occurred. The (SMI) employee did not check the date of the payment file he prepared for processing on Thanksgiving morning," the state child support office said in a document describing the mistake.

But Troupe said the state was at fault for allowing an old payment file to linger in the computer system without notifying the contractor.

"It was the state's responsibility to remove that file, and they didn't remove that file," Troupe said.

Bailey said Thursday that the division's statement had a stronger tone than intended.

"I don't think the intent here is really to place blame. This is just a statement of fact," Bailey said. "Looking at the bigger picture, there are other issues that may be much larger."

Executives at SMI said they had expected the Thanksgiving payment file to be new, and there was no indication that the payment schedule had been changed.

"We followed the procedures we had followed since the beginning" of SMI's contract in October 1999, said Clyde Stith, the company's director of operations.

The Thanksgiving mistake occurred shortly after two administrative changes.

The state project manager, Charles Hollingsworth, had quit a week earlier to go to work for SMI.

And in late September, the Department of Social Service's data processing center began scheduling the automated computer runs that result in the child-support payment files sent to SMI. That process previously was overseen by corporate contractor IBM.

Because of the two changes, there may have been a lack of communication about how to handle holiday payments.

Bailey said that "there may have been some confusion on a daily routine, but the process itself has been pretty much in place" for a couple of years and so the changes should not have led to a mistake.