Expert supports claims on child support agency

By David Waite
Advertiser Courts Writer

An accountant for child-support recipients testified yesterday that the state agency charged with ensuring the payments are made on time had about $7.2 million on its books in February that already should have been paid to waiting parents.

Steven Sakamaki, a certified public accountant, said he compiled the figure by looking at three bank accounts maintained by the Child Support Enforcement Agency since its inception in 1986, and deducting costs associated with running the agency.

By law, the agency has two business days from the time it receives payments from parents under court order to pay child support to send out checks to the "custodial parents" who are owed money.

After allowing for checks that were in the mail or not yet been cashed by recipients, Sakamaki said he concluded that as of Feb. 28, the agency had failed to disburse $7.2 million within the required 48 hours.

Sakamaki was called as a witness by a group of people who claim the agency has mishandled their child support accounts. The class-action lawsuit is being heard in a jury-waived trial before Circuit Judge Sabrina McKenna.

State Deputy Attorneys General Charles Fell and Diane Taira, representing the state agency, claim that Sakamaki used a faulty methodology. They are expected to present their own financial expert next week.

In his opening argument on Tuesday, Fell said the agency had less than $440,000 in support payments on its books at the end of February that had been held for more than 48 hours.

Plaintiff attorneys Francis O'Brien, Timothy Cohalen, Sam Khoury and Christopher Ferrara claim that poor accounting practices at the agency led to a situation in which agency officials no longer could say who had paid money into two of the three bank accounts the agency has used since its inception in 1986. Nor could it say to whom that money was owed, the lawyers contend.

In testimony on Wednesday, James Aughenbaugh, an inspector with the agency's Hilo office, said that when checks are returned by the post office because of an invalid address, no attempt is made to locate the recipient or to update the address.

And when inspectors have information that can be used to correct data stored in the agency's central computer, they are not allowed to enter it, but must pass it on to computer programmers at the agency's main office in Kapolei, Aughenbaugh said.

He acknowledged that he was suspended for seven days for entering what his supervisors felt were "negative comments" about the agency in a narrative file in one of the agency's computerized client records.

Aughenbaugh said he was suspended for telling a client that there was little likelihood the client's problem would be pursued after being passed on to the Child Support Enforcement Agency's main office on Oahu, "because no one at Kapolei reads the files."

He said he entered the notation after a problem resolution team had been disbanded.

The trial is expected to conclude by the middle of next week.