Child-support claims sought for $3.9 million
By David Waite
Advertiser Staff Writer
Five years after a class-action lawsuit was filed over millions of dollars in undistributed child-support payments, those who say they never received the checks they were due can file their claims.
The state is asking people who received less in child-support payments than they expected between 1996 and the end of last year to file a claim with the state Child Support Enforcement Agency.
"If they have all the information, payments could happen very fast, less than a couple of weeks and more in the order of a couple of days," said Deputy Attorney General Diane Taira, who represented the Child Support agency in the case.
In some cases, the "custodial parent" may be due as little as $20 or $30 in child-support money that was never received and in a few rare cases, $2,000 or $3,000. But many cases involve a single child support check in the range of $250 to $350, Taira said.
Honolulu attorney Francis O'Brien said efforts to find the rightful owners of $3.9 million in undistributed money held by the agency is the culmination of efforts to see that the money goes to the children for which it was meant. O'Brien, fellow Honolulu attorney Christopher Ferrara and two Mainland lawyers filed a lawsuit against the state in 1998, and last week were awarded $404,000 in fees and about $97,000 in costs related to their work on the case by Circuit Judge Sabrina McKenna. O'Brien said the claims are to be paid by March 31, 2004, and that the fees McKenna awarded to him and the other three lawyers will be paid from whatever is left after all the claims have been paid.
O'Brien said the state will be liable for attorney fees and costs in the case if there is not enough left in the fund after claims are paid out.
The suit was filed on behalf of Anne Kemp, a divorced mother who had a court order to have child-support payments deducted from her husband's paycheck, as is the case in most divorce cases where child support is ordered.
Kemp found that although the support payments were being deducted from her former husband's paycheck, the Child Support Enforcement Agency was not passing the money on to her within 48 hours as required by state and federal law.
When Kemp tried to straighten out the matter, she said she was met with what seemed at the time to be indifference if not ineptitude and an unresponsive agency.
Kemp sued the agency and the case became a class-action lawsuit on behalf of others who experienced similar problems. Kemp stayed with the lawsuit even though her problems were resolved within weeks of filing the lawsuit.
McKenna in October ordered a full accounting of the undistributed money held by the Child Support Enforcement Agency in an attempt to determine who had submitted the payments and on behalf of which children.
The agency completed that task by the March 31 deadline imposed by McKenna and is now accepting claims from people who say they are owed money.
Taira said that the millions of dollars in undistributed child-support money resulted from checks being returned because of "bad addresses" and checks that were sent by the agency but never cashed or returned.
Taira said people who want to file a claim should send a letter addressed to the Child Support Enforcement Agency Class Action Claims, P.O. Box 1950, Honolulu, HI 96805-1950. Or they may visit the agency's offices on the four major islands. The O'ahu office is at 601 Kamokila Blvd. in Kapolei. In addition, McKenna has scheduled a Circuit Court hearing for Oct. 7 on behalf of people who believe they are owed money by the agency.
People who write to or visit the agency to file claims should be able to provide the name of the person to whom the support payment was due, that person's social security number, a current mailing address and, if possible, the personal identification number assigned by the agency to the particular case and the case number.
Claimants will have to sign a form under threat of perjury saying that they are who they say they are.
The attorney general's office is still considering appealing "several aspects" of McKenna's ruling in the case, including the amount of attorney fees, Taira said.
"Our written position was that they should have been more to the order of $200,000, if any, and not $400,000," Taira said. "We also felt strongly that the case did not merit four attorneys, two local and two from the Mainland.
She said the state "did well overall" in persuading McKenna to reduce the $250 an hour rate sought by O'Brien and Ferrara and $350 an hour rate sought by the two Mainland attorneys who worked on the case. McKenna awarded a "blended" rate of $185 for all of the attorneys.
But O'Brien said that while the fees that were awarded were less than were sought, McKenna's decision to award attorney fees to him and the three others "is a clear indication that we prevailed in this case."
