Karen Schieffer, a divorced mother of two, fights to get her monthly child-support checks -- not with her ex-husband, but with the central system set up by Kansas more than a year ago to process those payments.

"I sure hope you can help, because I'm tired of fighting with this KPC (Kansas Payment Center) system," the Lawrence woman recently wrote to Kansas officials.

The center, which struggled under the burden of thousands of delayed checks when it opened almost 14 months ago, is no longer deluged by angry callers wondering why they did not get their child support.

Schieffer, however, is evidence that those problems are not completely cleared up.

The uproar began with the start of the payment center in September 2000, when child-support collection was taken away from county courts and centralized in Topeka. A private company, Tier Technologies, began collecting and disbursing child-support checks from all over Kansas.

Suddenly money that had arrived at homes like clockwork stopped. Angry parents called the payment center in Topeka to find out what happened to their money, but sometimes they were put on hold for hours.

Kathleen Sloan remembers all too well the first few months of the new system. As district court trustee in Johnson County, she had been responsible for collecting and disbursing child support before the changeover.

Even though it was no longer their responsibility, Sloan and her office were besieged by calls from desperate parents looking for anyone who might help.

"A year ago at this time...everybody's getting phone calls. There is a lot of money floating around, and people don't have it," she said.

Under Tier Technologies' contract with Kansas, payments coming in are supposed to be mailed out within 48 hours. If there is a problem and that cannot be done, the money goes into "suspense" until a recipient can be determined. That could take days or even weeks. Some money collected months ago remains undisbursed.

The Department of Social and Rehabilitation Services still is trying to untangle the bookkeeping nightmare caused by last year's payment confusion, one official said.

Schieffer, the Lawrence mother who has struggled to get answers from the state, said simple errors were at the heart of the off-and-on problems that cropped up most recently in September. In one case two missing digits from the end of her identification number created the trouble, and in another it was a keystroke error. But solutions were less simple.

"I would verify all the information they would ask me for, and then they would still have difficulties releasing them (her checks)," she said.

Centralizing

In 1996, Congress ordered all states to establish central child-support payment systems as part of welfare reform. A central processing point, it was reasoned, would make it easier to collect support payments and to track down those who did not pay.

In welfare cases, more money paid in child support translates into less the federal government has to spend on welfare.

Major business interests also pushed Congress to mandate central payment operations. Large companies that withhold child support from employee checks prefer to write one check to a payment center rather than writing hundreds of individual checks to the counties where the divorces were granted.

Most states, according to national experts, experienced difficulties implementing their central payment systems, and some had problems much worse than Kansas'.

A computer error shut down the Illinois system in 1999, and the state Legislature there had to approve an emergency appropriation so checks could be mailed before Christmas. After the computer problem was solved, the state sent out letters asking for the money back. Little was recovered.

In Michigan, officials estimated in May of this year that between $24 million and $30 million each quarter was not reaching the intended families.

Thousands of checks in Nevada were delayed when a new computer system's expected $22.6 million price rose to more than $100 million.

Problems in Missouri appeared to be far fewer than those in many other states.

Unlike Kansas, Missouri started with one county and slowly phased in its system until it was fully implemented in October 1999.

There were mistakes, but they never became a crisis, officials said. For example, 60,000 notices mailed in May about changes in child-support payments never reached affected parents because addresses were wrong.

"There were some late checks," said Rep. Marsha Campbell, a Kansas City Democrat. "I didn't hear from anyone, but I know there were some complaints. At most, it was a one-month problem."

Overall, Missouri officials are happy with their new system.

Systems and Methods was chosen to run it. In August the company processed $41.7 million for 245,000 payments. Errors were made in 205 payments that month, said Susan Robison, an official with the Missouri Division of Child Support Enforcement.

"It's been wonderful," Robison said.

Kansas improving

Despite the federal mandate for a centralized processing center, the Kansas Legislature did not endorse the idea. The payment center eventually was created by an order from the Kansas Supreme Court.

Kansas officials say many of their problems were caused by bringing that system online all at once.

"We weren't prepared for the volume," Social and Rehabilitation Services Secretary Janet Schalansky told a legislative committee in January.

She said Tier Technologies did not have enough people to do the work or enough telephone lines to handle the torrent of complaint calls.

On top of that, thousands of checks every month arrive without enough information for routine handling. Sometimes case numbers or county names are missing, and sometimes addresses for recipients are incorrect.

Some checks come in from small employers with only a yellow, handwritten memo sticker to tell center officials where it goes or who sent it.

At the height of the confusion, as many as 10 percent of the checks received by the center ended up going into the suspense file.

In October 2000, Kansas Payment Center officials faced delays in paying $2 million in child support. By February that amount had dropped to more than $1 million. Now the figure is about $250,000 a month, according to a report from the payment center.

"This is still unacceptable," said Rep. Dean Newton, a Prairie Village Republican. "Many of these people rely on that money to put food on the table."

Since last October, the company added employees, growing from about 45 to about 80 earlier this year.

About 20 of the payment center's employees spend each workday just trying to fix payment problems.

Tier brought in a new payment center director, Don Atwell, earlier this year. He began putting information on an Internet site so those paying and receiving child support could track payment histories better.

Staff members who take calls from the public are trained better and stay on the job longer. The time that people are put on hold has dropped significantly, center officials said.

The Kansas Legislature finally endorsed the payment center earlier this year, and it set up an oversight commission. Sloan, the Johnson County court trustee, was elected its leader.

"We still hear complaints, but it's much better," she said.

The center processes about 150,000 payments each month. In September it processed $25.8 million.

Atwell said the current error rate was two for every 1,000 transactions, a rate considered good when compared with other states'.

"We only hear about the bad ones, and we think things are falling apart," he recently told a meeting of the oversight commission in Topeka. "There's plenty that goes right."

While members of the oversight commission praise the improvements, some think more are needed.

"There are still complaints that people are getting five or six different people every time they call in," said Marti Crow, a state representative from Leavenworth County.

Crow also said the center needed to work on reducing the $250,000 a month in the suspense file.

"We seem to have reached a plateau," she said.

Even with an improving system, divorce lawyers say the old system in Johnson County was better under Sloan's office than under the centralized system.

If there was a problem, it could be solved by dealing with someone familiar in the Olathe office. That doesn't happen with the central payment system.

The old court trustee system in Johnson County "had an incredible record of collecting child support for years," said Ron Nelson, an Overland Park family-law attorney.

But officials involved with the payment center say improvement continues.

"There are always glitches you have to follow," said Jim Robertson, the director of child-support enforcement for Social and Rehabilitation Services. "These bugs are being worked out."

Kansas City Star

-- Anonymous, November 29, 2001