Child support agency failing parents, suit says
By David Waite
Advertiser Staff Writer
When Ann Kemp got a divorce in 1996, one of the things that helped ease the trepidation that came with being a suddenly single parent was a court order that her ex-husband pay child support.
Six years later, Kemp is one of dozens of plaintiffs locked in a legal battle with the state Child Support Enforcement Agency, which was supposed to make sure she got her monthly child support payments on time.
A key issue in the jury-waived trial before Circuit Judge Sabrina McKenna, set to begin Sept. 10, is whether the agency is substantially meeting requirements under state and federal law that it process incoming child support checks and send them to intended recipients within 48 hours.
One option proposed by Kemp's lawyers would be for the court to intervene directly in agency operations, perhaps by appointing a "special master" or hiring outside staff to tackle the problems.
State lawyers say the agency today is in "substantial compliance" with getting the checks out on time. But for Kemp, the agency that has used powerful tools — such as the ability to block issuance or renewal of professional and driver's licenses and intercept tax returns of parents who fall behind in their child support payments — has become foe instead of friend.
When three months had passed and Kemp, an attorney, had yet to receive her first child-support check, she began asking questions.
Her ex-husband assured her that his employer was withholding the amount prescribed by Family Court and sending a check to the Child Support Enforcement Agency every month. If there was a problem, he told her, it must be with that part of the system.
So Kemp set about trying to sort things out with the agency, which was established in accordance with state and federal law to eliminate or at least crack down on "deadbeat" parents. To her, the agency was a seemingly impenetrable fortress.
The agency's mission, reduced to its simplest terms, is to make sure kids don't go hungry or unclothed or without proper shelter for lack of a child-support check. But to Kemp, it was turning out to be a monument to inefficiency at best and indifference at worst.
Finally someone at the enforcement agency leveled with her: The agency had received her husband's payments but had not gotten around to sending her a check. No, they told her, they couldn't cut a check on the spot. It would have to be mailed.
"Isn't there something I can do to resolve this problem?" Kemp asked.
The answer pushed her past the boiling point.
"I guess you'll just have to sue us," she was told.
Utterly frustrated, Kemp turned to a team of lawyers who filed a lawsuit on her behalf in 1998, setting the stage for the trial next month.
State Deputy Attorneys General Charles Fell and Diane Taira represent the agency, which falls under the Attorney General's office. While they contend it is in substantial compliance today with the 48-hour check-turnaround rule, they cannot say how often the agency complies with the rule or what percentage of checks are mailed out on time.
The task is an enormous one.
Child Support Enforcement, with almost 200 employees and an annual appropriation of $18 million, sends checks to about 35,000 child-support recipients per month, logging in an estimated $90 million to $95 million in child-support payments per year.
Taira and Fell claim the agency has solved most past problems and gets checks out on time, most of the time. In a recent court hearing, Fell told McKenna the agency could account for all but about $100,000 that was paid in.
"A relatively small percentage of monies received by the agency are held for a variety of justifiable reasons, such as the identity of the payee is not sufficiently identified by the payor, the address of the payee is inaccurate or for some other reason 'bad,' or a termination of child support is pending," Fell told The Advertiser.
Most of the checks are mailed on time, and when they are held up, it is for good reason, he said.
"No agency could be in perfect compliance, since the Child Support Enforcement Agency does not get the information it needs, on occasion, to pay the money out timely," Fell said. "This lack of information causes delays. Nor can any agency avoid the occasional mistakes inherent in human nature. Thus, anecdotal accounts of agency action or inaction are inevitable in the awesome task assumed by the CSEA."
Child-support enforcement officials have declined to discuss individual cases such as Kemp's, citing privacy concerns.
Attorneys Francis O'Brien, Christopher Ferrara and Timothy Cohelan, who represent Kemp and others who either make child-support payments or receive them, claim the agency is beset with accounting problems so severe it currently carries $7.5 million in child-support payments on its books that it cannot account for: neither where the money came from nor to whom it is owed.
That doesn't surprise J. Ann Smith. She's been waging a years-long battle from her home in Cincinnati, Ohio, to get the Child Support Enforcement Agency to correct what she says are horrendous bookkeeping problems with her account. Smith said the crowning blow came last year, when the Hawai'i office intercepted her federal income tax return and rebate to clear up an overdue backlog in payments that Smith said she had resolved on her own months before.
She was working in Hawai'i in 1996 when she got divorced and was ordered to pay child support. Her son now lives with her ex-
husband in Florida and she lives and works in Ohio, but her employer in Cincinnati still must make deductions for child support and send them to the Child Support Enforcement Agency in Hawai'i.
A child-support agency in Ohio monitors the transactions to make sure Smith stays up to date with her obligations. She says Ohio's recordkeeping is fine, while Hawai'i's is rife with errors.
"Regardless of interstate agency agreements and repeated notifications that its accounting is wrong, the CSEA in Hawai'i refuses to correct things," Smith said. "I have also learned that no action has been taken on an administrative review I recently requested."
She has all but given up trying to resolve things with the Hawai'i enforcement agency and is desperately hoping the upcoming trial will force it to be more responsive to the needs of people it deals with.
"I also feel the public should be fully aware of how CSEA is serving them, particularly given the fact that their goal is to effect financial support of the very children from whom they are withholding money due to sloppy accounting practices," Smith said.
"It is socially irresponsible to take money out of the hands of parents like myself in the name of supporting my child, without having sound accounting practices in place that ensures the system is fair and effective."
Smith said she understands the agency was created to try to prevent negligent parents from skipping out on their child-support obligations, and believes that is a lofty goal.
"But those of us who do not shirk our responsibilities and the children we support are being held hostage by a broken system," she said.
Reach David Waite at dwaite@honoluluadvertiser.com or 525-8030.
