COLUMBUS, Ohio (AP) -- The state must pay an $8 million federal fine because of problems meeting federal child support requirements, a state official said Wednesday.

The problems include a computer system that withheld hundreds of thousands of dollars in child support payments from some parents since 1996, said Jacqueline Romer-Sensky, director of the Ohio Department of Job and Family Services.

She acknowledged Tuesday that the payments had been withheld, confirming a report by the Association for Children for Enforcement of Support, a Toledo-based national organization that works on child support issues.

Gov. Bob Taft ordered Romer-Sensky to provide an analysis of the problem by Monday.

Romer-Sensky said the Job and Family Service Department's computer calculated some child-support payments incorrectly. But no direct payments were lost and the missed payments were back payments that noncustodial parents had added to regular child-support payments, Romer-Sensky said.

She said she did not know how much money the computer missed in back payments or how many families were affected.

Romer-Sensky told the Ohio House's Health and Family Services committee that the department is doing its best to find out how much money is involved.

``This is really about unrealistic federal expectations,'' she said. ``How you take what are very good goals and achieve them accurately.''

Her department will comply with Taft's memo and hopes to have the computer glitch cleared up and to begin looking for parents owed back payments by April 1, she said.

The affected payments are from cases in which a child has a custodial parent on welfare and a noncustodial parent who is behind on child support. In such cases, the state is allowed to take the portion used for catching up with back payments as compensation for the state making the welfare payment to the custodial parent.

In 1996, federal law changed to reduce how much child support the state could collect, allowing more money to go directly to children. But Ohio still is operating under a more stringent 1988 law, meaning Ohio children haven't benefited from the federal revision.

Ohio.com

-- Anonymous, February 08, 2001

Answers

State could owe as much as $10 million in child
support payments

COLUMBUS, Ohio (AP) -- The state could owe families as much as $10 million in child support payments withheld by a computer system, an official said Thursday.

Jacqueline Romer-Sensky, director of the Ohio Department of Job and Family Services, called the figure a ``very rough estimate'' that state officials are still working on.

The state already faces an $8 million federal fine because of problems meeting federal child support requirements.

The problems include a computer system that withheld child support payments from some parents since 1996.

Gov. Bob Taft ordered Romer-Sensky to provide an analysis of the problem by Monday. She said she hoped to include in that analysis an accurate figure of how much is owed.

Romer-Sensky said the Job and Family Service Department's computer calculated some child-support payments incorrectly. No direct payments were lost and the missed payments were back payments that noncustodial parents had added to regular child-support payments, Romer-Sensky said.

She said she did not know how much money the computer missed in back payments or how many families were affected.

The state previously paid a $50 million fine for missing deadlines for delaying the implementation of a centralized system for child-support payments.

Romer-Sensky told the House Finance and Appropriations Committee Thursday that the state believes it has met all other federal requirements for implementing this system. Ohio should not be liable for an additional $50 million fine, she said.

If the federal government disagreed, ``it would be unfair, punitive and we would fight it,'' she said.

Ohio.com

-- Anonymous, February 09, 2001

Agency official admits blocking parents' money

COLUMBUS - Ohio's human-services director revealed yesterday that the state knowingly withheld an estimated $10 million in back child-support payments from parents who were on welfare.

Officials believe the money has been owed to an undetermined number of parents since October 1997, said Jacqueline Romer-Sensky, director of the Department of Job & Family Services. She said she did not know how long it would take state workers to manually sort through records to identify who should receive the improperly withheld payments.

Romer-Sensky's admission drew howls of protest from children's and parental rights groups, who said the state's actions were illegal and unconscionable.

"Those guys who have made those payments, is anybody making sure that their accounts were credited?" asked Melanie Snider, national legal services director for the Association for Children for Enforcement of Support.

"Heaven knows if some of them were sent to jail. Are we double-charging them for interest? Are we taking away their driver's licenses? All those things could be happening. The implications are huge.

"This one kills me," added Snider, a California lawyer who represents ACES' Ohio chapter in Toledo, which blew the whistle on the debacle Monday. "It's so wrong. They made a conscious choice to do that to children. It's absolutely illegal."

The state is allowed to attach child support when a custodial parent begins getting welfare benefits, but Ohio also improperly withheld past-due support payments.

Romer-Sensky said she was forced to delay fixing a programming error that led to the withholding of past-due support in order to focus on getting the department's computerized Support Enforcement Tracking System up by Oct. 1.

By meeting that federal deadline and another edict that Ohio centralize its collection and distribution operation, the state appears to have avoided $64 million in fines, Romer-Sensky said.

She said American Management Systems, which has $105 million in contracts to install the tracking system and other computer systems, was unable to work on both projects simultaneously because they presented a "sequencing" problem that required the state to get the tracking system operational first.

"So they ripped off families?" Snider asked incredulously.

"Does that make it OK? I don’t think so."

Neal Grossman, who heads the Cleveland organization Fathers and Mothers for Equal Rights, said the uncorrected programming error, other computer glitches and an inability to get child-support workers to respond to their phone calls had caused untold problems for parents and children.

"It is normal procedure for them not to send out the correct amount of money," Grossman said.

"What’s appalling is the fact that when money is sent in [by the noncustodial parent] and the [custodial] parent calls and says, It’s not the right amount,’ it can take anywhere from that day to six months to get it straightened out. It is the biggest farce going anywhere."

To avoid legal problems, Grossman advised noncustodial parents who mail their own support payments to enclose a self-addressed, stamped envelope requesting a certified receipt of payment.

Romer-Sensky told members of the House Finance/Appropriations Committee that the state faces an $8 million fine for not fixing the support-withholding problem.

She criticized the federal government for imposing unrealistic deadlines for computerizing and centralizing support-collection efforts, saying the fines only punished children.

"Taking money out of the child-support system is not a real smart way to fix the child-support system," she said. "It’s time to raise hell in Washington."

The Plain Dealer

-- Anonymous, February 09, 2001

Nobody said it would be easy switching from a county-run system to a statewide system of collecting and distributing child-support payments.

The change was required by the 1996 federal welfare reform law. Federal officials wanted to make sure that states could track parents as they move across state lines, ensuring that payments to kids get made.

The law also intended to ensure that states sent along payments to custodial parents within two business days.

But problems surfaced almost from the start. In Ohio, 846,000 cases that had been handled by the state's 88 counties suddenly came under the state's control.

Under a system known as Child Support Payment Central, Bank One received a $125 million, five-year contract to set up a statewide banking account.

Child-support payments come into the account either directly from paying parents or from their employers, who withhold the payments from wages. Bank One is supposed to process the payments, then send them on to parents raising kids.

But problems that counties could resolve in hours — mistakes including missing or erroneous information from parents or employers — soon led to days and weeks of delays by the state.

“We're familiar with the cases,” said Daniel Cade, executive director of Butler County's Child Support Enforcement Agency. “If a check didn't have a Social Security number on it, we could identify it and resolve it in the same day. It may take the state two weeks to do it.”

Ms. Romer-Sensky describes the process this way:

For every 1,000 checks that Bank One receives, 30 cannot be sent out because of incomplete or missing information. Of those 30, Bank One corrects and sends out 24 within two days. The remaining six go to the state agency, which resolves problems with five within two weeks. For the sixth, it takes longer.

Jeff Lyttle, spokesman for Bank One Corp. in Columbus, said the bank is working hard to try to resolve problems. “We are meeting frequently and talking constantly,” he said.

Yet solutions seem elusive.

Mr. Taft has proposed increasing funding for child-support collection by $30 million, which may help pay to hire new workers at the Bank One center. But that money is proposed for the fiscal year that starts July 1.

Mark Mallory, D-Cincinnati, has heard plenty from constituents. “I haven't seen any real push to get this thing resolved,” Mr. Mallory said. “I can't be the only legislator that's getting calls from all these people.”

Complaints widespread
Officials all across the state are getting calls.

The Hamilton County Department of Human Services is taking up to 1,000 complaints a week. And that doesn't include calls made directly to the department's 108 child-support caseworkers, agency spokeswoman Denise Winkler said.

Butler County has counted at least 185 late or misdirected payments since Oct. 1, said that county's Mr. Cade. When the payments were handled by the county, there would be one mistake like that a month, he said.

“In Ohio, they took something that worked well, and they broke it,” he said.

Ms. Murrie, 44, a Cincinnati resident, could always count on receiving her child-support checks for her two kids, every week, as reliable as clockwork.

But since October, her checks have been running three weeks behind.

“I'm close to tears with frustration,” she said. “I've had to go through half of my savings to pay bills. The system is failing everybody.”

Ms. Burns, 28, who lives with her 7-year-old daughter in Fairfield, has been late paying bills because her support checks are three weeks behind, too.

“This has caused me to be charged late fees,” she said. “Is the state going to pay them?”

Mr. Brickler, 41, of Alexandria, has spent months trying to convince Ohio that his child-support obligations ended when his daughter turned 18.

He said he actually overpaid the system $200. Yet he said he received a letter from the state last month threatening to withhold $709 from this year's income tax refund unless he paid up.

“It's stealing people's money,” said Mr. Brickler, a computer consultant. “I'm living in a hell. I wish they would clean up the system because it's not working.”

Collection rate up
Despite the problems, Ohio's child-support efforts have had some success.

The state's collection rate for current child-support money owed increased from 62.2 percent in fiscal year 1996 to 66.4 percent in fiscal year 2000. Nationally, the average collection rate for 1999 was 52 percent, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

The amount of child support distributed in Ohio has nearly tripled, from $666 million in fiscal year 1992 to $1.74 billion in fiscal year 2000, according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. The national increase in child-support distribution over that same period more than doubled, from $8 billion to $18 billion.

But increased collections have not come cheap.

Setting up Ohio's centralized system has cost more than $250 million in federal and state funds for computers and personnel.

In addition, the state has incurred $50 million in federal fines for missing deadlines for setting up the statewide system and other problems. Another $66 million fine has been threatened.

The state won't actually pay that money, but the federal government could withhold it in future payments to the state.

Now, new expenses loom to fix the system, and no one is sure what those costs will be.

“I would hope that within the next couple of months, we could make some progress,” said Ms. Newsom of the Ohio Child Support Enforcement Agency Directors Association.

“It's going to take a while to work things out.”

The Cincinnati Enquirer

-- Anonymous, February 12, 2001

Child support advocates sue state

BY ANDREW WELSH-HUGGINS
AP Statehouse Reporter

COLUMBUS, Ohio (AP) -- The state illegally withheld millions of dollars in child support payments from needy families and should be forced to return the money immediately, an advocacy group claimed in a lawsuit filed Friday.

The Toledo-based Association for Children for Enforcement of Support also asked a judge to order the state to immediately fix problems with its child support system.

``Certainly this is the case of government at its worst,'' Geraldine Jensen, ACES president, said Friday. ``Government that takes care of itself and neglects its people, and its most vulnerable and poorest, the children.''

Jensen said the state could owe millions in illegally held back payments. She said her group also plans a federal lawsuit.

The lawsuit in the 10th Ohio District Court of Appeals asked a judge to order that the Ohio Department of Job and Family Services:

-- Return any money illegally taken from families.

-- Award interest on any delayed payments to families.

-- Distribute regular child support payments within two business days.

-- Return money held from federal income tax refunds within six months.

``We have families waiting weeks, months for payments,'' Jensen said. ``Families are suffering, kids are going to bed hungry because the state literally stole money out of the mouths of babes.''

Jon Allen, a spokesman for Job and Family Services, would not comment on the lawsuit. ``They've been threatening this for many months,'' he said. ``Our plan has been aimed at doing what it is right -- addressing issues that have been identified and getting the money where it's supposed to go to.''

The state said it will fix the computer problem and begin sending refunding by April 1.

Earlier this month, Job and Family Services said that it owes parents at least $3 million in back child-support payments. The state didn't reprogram its computer system to stop intercepting the overdue child-support payments going to people on welfare.

A 1996 federal law prohibited states from taking those back payments from parents on welfare.

Jensen said the state could owe as much as $13 million in back payments -- $3 million owed since October, $5 million owed by the state from 1997 to October and another $5 million the state sent to the federal government instead of parents.

The lawsuit was filed the day after officials acknowledged that Bank One printed more than 1,000 child support checks on the wrong-colored paper, causing concern that banks won't cash the checks. Allen said the checks are on plain white paper instead of blue patterned paper and look like a photocopy.

Bank One has a five-year $125 million contract with Job and Family Services to process and distribute the state's child support payments.

The bank and the state are trying to make sure child support recipients and other banks know that the misprinted checks are authentic, Allen said.

``Bank One takes full responsibility for this error,'' Bill Hartman, chairman of Bank One in Ohio, said in the written statement.

Ohio.com

-- Anonymous, February 24, 2001

State mails first batch of late support
checks

COLUMBUS — The state Friday mailed the first batch of checks containing overdue child support payments that it incorrectly withheld from parents on welfare.

The Ohio Department of Job and Family Services followed through on its Feb. 27 promise to parents that they would receive their checks within 10 business days, said Jon Allen, the department's spokesman.

The checks total $1.14 million and cover money the state had withheld from families in 8,300 cases from October through January. Late next week, the state intends to mail checks to families owed money from February.

Roughly $5 million more will be returned once the state determines which families are owed money from October 1997 to September 2000.

The department, under the leadership of then-Director Jacqueline Romer-Sensky, had continued to withhold the money after a 1996 federal law prohibited states from denying overdue child support payments to parents on welfare. The state failed to reprogram its computer system to stop intercepting the back payments by the Oct. 1, 2000, deadline.

As of March 1, part of the system had been repro- grammed to ensure that families on welfare received their overdue child support checks. Those checks will be issued weekly — instead of within 40 hours of receiving the money as the law requires — until September, when the fully reprogrammed system allows the state to issue the checks according to the law.

The Cincinnati Enquirer

-- Anonymous, March 10, 2001