EDITORIAL
Child support agency needs a close look

We're not about to take sides in a civil lawsuit, but that won't stop us from worrying about the concerns raised in a 4-year-old class action against the Child Support Enforcement Agency.

The lawsuit, by attorneys Francis O'Brien, Christopher Ferrara and Timothy Cohelan, suggests that the agency has a hard time accounting quickly and accurately for money received and disbursed, a suggestion the state flatly denies.

Yet it's not hard to see why it's at least a potential problem: State and federal laws require that money received — most usually deducted from the paychecks of people with child- support obligations — be logged in and paid out to the recipient within two days.

If O'Brien is correct, the agency has allowed millions of dollars to build up in accounts that it then had to close because it could no longer determine exactly who had paid money in and where it was supposed to go.

The state disputes such claims, saying the agency is in "substantial compliance" with the two-day turnaround requirement.

The lawsuit comes amid many years of anecdotal complaints about long-delayed and incorrect payments and enormous difficulty encountered by clients attempting to contact the agency, and a tendency by the state to be defensive rather than corrective.

The point here is that these are our keiki we're talking about. It's not too much to ask that the Child Support Enforcement Agency be among the state's best, in terms of performance, accessibility and accountability.