Child support stuck in system

In the often-contentious world of child support, it’s not uncommon for one parent to tell the other that the child-support check is “in the mail.”

Sometimes, it’s just an excuse to put off a nagging ex-spouse.

But other times, as Debbie Ecker of Queens, N.Y., discovered, the check really was in the mail — it just got stuck in the state’s child-support system.

“My ex-husband missed some payments, so I called” the child-support agency, she said.

Many phone calls later, a check for about $1,000 arrived.

“They said they were holding my money because they thought I was no longer at this address,” said Mrs. Ecker, adding that that was an odd explanation because she has collected child-support checks at the same address for years.

Quite a few child-support payments go missing each year, the federal government’s watchdog agency said recently in an unprecedented report.

States had around $657 million in “undistributed” child-support collections in fiscal 2002, the General Accounting Office (GAO) said in a March report. (The agency has since been renamed the Government Accountability Office.)

These payments, or “UDC” in child-support parlance, encompass everything from tax refunds that are temporarily — and legally — held by states to pay child-support debts to child-support checks mailed to custodial parents that haven’t been cashed yet.

In dollars and cents, UDC is not a huge problem — it’s roughly 3 percent of the $20 billion in child-support payments that are successfully processed each year.

Moreover, as much as 61 percent of the UDC is held for good reason, federal and state officials said in recent interviews with The Washington Times.

But the thought of state officials vacuuming money out of paychecks and failing to deliver it to families with children infuriates more than a few child-support advocates.

UDC “is one of those rare issues where custodial and noncustodial parents are probably united,” said Murray Davis, a co-founder of National Family Justice Association, an advocacy group that has been monitoring UDC scandals in Michigan and other states.

And there’s no doubt, according to the GAO report, that every year millions of dollars in child-support payments get caught in the system and end up being declared “undistributable” or abandoned property under state law.

“What you see in this [GAO] report is overzealous collection of money that should never have been taken” from parents, said Ron Henry, a child-advocacy lawyer in the District. Money that can’t be distributed should be returned to its rightful owner, the noncustodial parent, he said.

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