Child support stuck in system

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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.