Melissa Kiger of Danville, Ill., has bounced six checks in the last few months, had her telephone disconnected and fallen perilously behind on car payments.
Yet Kiger, a 24-year-old single mother who works as a cashier at a gas station, is hardly to blame. Nor is the father of one of her two children, whose paycheck gets docked regularly to provide child support.
Kiger and thousands of Illinois parents like her who live on the financial edge have been caught in the switches of a new high-tech system designed by the state to streamline child-support payments. Instead, it has done the opposite.
“It may not seem like a lot of money to some people,” said Kiger, who until days ago was missing $800 worth of support checks dating back three months. “But when you’re a single mom, 800 bucks is a lot.”
While critical problems with the system surfaced last fall, an examination by the Tribune shows that the mess can be tied to last-minute design changes, faulty assumptions, broken promises and a woeful underestimation of the job.
The state’s new support-check clearinghouse based in Wheaton went on-line Oct. 1, and ever since it has been a textbook study in the kind of bungling that bureaucracy bashers love to rant about.
Tens of thousands of child-support checks have been lost, delayed or made out for wildly inaccurate amounts. Checks have been mailed to addresses where recipients haven’t lived for years. In one foul-up, five support checks were somehow mailed to a prison inmate with no known links to the woman who was supposed to receive them.
Instead of phasing in the system to work out the kinks, clearinghouse officials fired it up all at once even while paper records for thousands of child-support cases were still packed in boxes waiting to be keypunched into computers.
Meanwhile, employers kept getting differing instructions on how to comply with the new system and were given less than two months to revamp complicated payroll operations.
Additionally, computers to enable court officials around the state to tap into the clearinghouse were delivered just weeks or, in some cases, days before it went into operation without training or technical support.
“It is the worst debacle I’ve seen in state government in 25 years,” said Sen. Vince Demuzio (D-Carlinville), the senior member of the Legislative Audit Commission, which has ordered a wide-scale review of clearinghouse problems. “This is a colossal screw-up.”
Today’s problems have their roots in a 1996 federal welfare-reform law. Tucked away in the reforms was a requirement that states designate one centralized location to process child-support checks.
The goal was to cure a headache for big employers, who had tired of the expense and hassle of having to comply with court orders to facilitate child-support payments for hundreds or thousands of workers.
Under the old system, the firms took the money from the salaries of workers required to pay support and cut individual checks, which were funneled to intended recipients through various government offices in the states where they lived.
The new system allows companies to write one big check, covering the support payments owed by all their workers in an individual state, and leaves it up to the state to parcel out the money to the intended parents.
Complying with the new federal mandate wasn’t hard for some states, such as New York, which long ago consolidated their child-support systems.
In Illinois and several other states, however, the process had remained decentralized. Circuit court clerks in each of Illinois’ 102 counties were responsible for oversight of child-support payments.
Several states that recently started centralized systems have experienced problems, but Illinois “has had by far the worst trouble,” said Teresa Myers, a policy analyst at the Denver-based National Conference of State Legislatures.
Illinois officials in 1998 hired DuPage County Circuit Clerk Joel Kagann to run the support-check processing center after a state clerks association fought to keep what was considered a plum contract away from private companies such as Bank One, which processes child-support checks in other states.
To win the contract, Kagann’s office made a slick sales pitch that touted DuPage County’s cutting-edge computer prowess. “This thing was supposed to be a stealth bomber,” one state official said.
Now, ironically, Bank One and the Arthur Andersen accounting firm have been hired on orders from Gov. George Ryan to audit Kagann’s operation. Illinois Auditor General William Holland also has launched a child-support inquiry.
In hindsight, Kagann says he regrets ever signing the state contract. But last October, at a ribbon-cutting for the new State Disbursement Unit housed in the basement of the DuPage County government complex basement, Kagann showed off the new system for state officials.
Checks whizzed through automatic scanners and jiggled in collating machines. The IBM-built AS-400 mainframe hummed in a snarl of wires.
Within days, thousands of angry calls poured in daily not only to Wheaton but also to the offices of state representatives, senators and the governor reporting missing child-support payments.
By mid-October, the state started a hot line operating six days a week that eventually grew to 70 lines. By the end of November, the Wheaton center had accumulated a backlog of 19,200 payments from employers that they had no information on how to divide up and where to send.
The mystery of many of those payments has since been solved, but problems continue.
In retrospect, plenty of warning signs preceded what all sides agree was a public policy catastrophe.
The federal target date for start-up of the clearinghouse was Oct. 1. But last April, before a House committee, Department of Public Aid official Robert Lyons promised the clearinghouse his agency was to oversee would be phased in to minimize glitches and would not start up at all until it was ready.
“Before this thing is turned on,” Lyons testified, “we are going to make sure it works.”
But Lyons’ boss, Public Aid Director Ann Patla, said in an interview she had been unaware of any phase-in plan.
In September, evidence was mounting that the system was nowhere near ready. By then, officials in each of the state’s far-flung counties were supposed to have provided computerized data on all their child-support cases to the clearinghouse.
But some county clerks, especially those Downstate, simply photocopied child-support court dockets and sent them to Wheaton in boxes that sat unopened for weeks.
DuPage officials failed to warn the state of looming data gaps, however, because they assumed the Oct. 1 deadline was set in stone, Kagann said. It wasn’t. By mid-October, after many states had sought extensions, Congress moved the clearinghouse deadline to April 1.
On a practical level, Kagann insists any request for a delay in the start-up of the Wheaton operation would have to have been made before August, when the state sent a bulletin to 350,000 Illinois employers telling them to send all child-support payments to Wheaton beginning Oct. 1.
“At that point, we were committed,” Kagann said.
But Patla said the system could have been aborted at the last minute. “We did not know there was a data problem,” she said. “If we had, I would not have turned on the system.”
State officials have tried to deflect some blame for clearinghouse problems on Illinois employers for failing to itemize who should get how much out of the checks they are sending to the Wheaton operation.
But the state’s own instructions to employers changed three times from August to October, according to state auditors. And employers say they were given less than two months to revamp computerized payroll systems to conform to the new state system.
Another problem involved child-support recipients whose checks had previously been mailed directly to them by employers of their ex-spouses or partners, bypassing the court system.
Circuit clerks rarely tracked those cases, so they had no paperwork to pass on to the clearinghouse to guide it in how to compensate these so-called direct-pay recipients.
“This one caught all of us with our pants down,” acknowledged Kagann, who said officials in planning the clearinghouse overlooked the unique problems posed by direct-pay recipients.
Three months into the crisis, the auditorium of the DuPage County government complex has been converted into a war room of sorts, filled with workers struggling to unravel the mystery of thousands of lost checks, which officials euphemistically refer to as “deferred.”
Meanwhile, in Springfield, 70 state employees help perform basic check processing–the job for which DuPage was hired to do. Dozens more field hot-line calls.
Hot-line workers have learned to tell women where they can get free food. They have pleaded with utility companies to keep the lights on and with landlords to persuade them not to evict families. They have sent emergency checks to women who can’t afford prescriptions.
“Either they’re crying because they can’t feed their kids,” said hot-line worker Morgan Farr, “or they cuss and scream at you, `I want my money!’ “
As the processing center foundered, Ryan ordered the release of emergency checks to fill the gap. At first, state officials thought $500,000 would suffice. But so far it has required nearly 22 times that amount, with at least 30,000 emergency checks totaling $10.8 million mailed out.
Though that money theoretically is supposed to be returned once recipients get their rightful checks, it could be politically prickly for the state to demand it back.
Still, there are clear signs of progress. In October, the state sent out 104,000 child-support checks. That number more than tripled by November. Hot-line calls have dropped from more than 14,000 a week in early November to 2,700 a week at the end of December.
Kiger is one of the lucky ones who have finally gotten all the money they were due. In fact, in the last few days, she has gotten more than she is due, illustrating another oddity of the system. In some cases it is now inexplicably spitting out overpayments to recipients who had been shortchanged for months.
On Thursday, a $730 check for Kiger arrived by Express Mail. She also received six more checks for $66.40 and yet another for $60.
“First they don’t give me enough; now they give me too much,” said a mystified Kiger, who cashed the big check and so far has held onto the others, though she is sure the state will demand the money back.
“If they had just left (the system) alone in the first place, then everything would have been fine,” Kiger said. “I just feel like it’s their fault. I think it’s their problem. I shouldn’t have to pay it back.”
