Family Support Division changing in wake of review

Thursday, Dec. 11, 2003 | 11:27 a.m.

The Clark County office responsible for collecting child support will be making a series of changes to improve a series of flaws highlighted by an outside review earlier this year, officials said Wednesday.

C.A. Watts, head of the district attorney's Family Support Division, and Bob Teuton, the assistant district attorney who oversees the division, said the changes would range from improving computer programs that only offer raw numbers to making it easier to freeze the assets of deadbeat parents.

Watts spoke Wednesday fresh from the first of a series of meetings between state and county officials meant to come up with a strategy for bettering the office's recent record -- which includes rates below the national average in establishing paternity, handing down court orders and collecting child support.

The plan being developed will also deal with the state Welfare Division's performance, which was not evaluated in the outside review.

Teuton said the review -- completed by an outside consultant in July but only made public earlier this week -- and the improvement plan were initiated by the county.

The Family Support Division began meeting separately to respond to the review's recommendations before the final draft was released in July and has already made some of the changes recommended by the review, Watts said. Many other changes depend on coordinating with the state, Watts said.

Teuton said "there might have been concurrent pressures from outside" prompting the review.

"We were aware there's been some disenchantment in the county with how we do business," he said.

Veronica Thronson, attorney for Clark County Legal Services, said her nonprofit agency sees hundreds of women each year who have problems collecting child support. A result, she said, is that many of them have to seek welfare.

Thronson said the review was needed and its recommendations should be followed.

Perhaps chief among those recommendations -- and an initial part of the strategy being laid out -- is the need to fix the computer program used to keep track of the county agency and the state Welfare Division, which also collects child support payments outside Clark County.

Both offices use a system, Teuton said, that allows both agencies to come up with the numbers of cases in a period of time and the basic information tied to each case, but has no capacity for "identifying problems and possible solutions."

It can't alert a case manager, for example, to the reasons a parent has stopped paying child support -- if he or she has lost a job, or become sick.

"Our priority up until now has been to keep the system operational, but now we have freed up resources from operations to management," Teuton said.

Results from an improved computer program won't be seen for another six months to a year, Watts said.

But following the review's recommendations will require additional money and hiring or shifting of personnel, the division chief said.

"A lot of this stuff -- to get it done -- requires people," he said.

He said the review also recommended hiring an analyst to make sense of the improved computer program. The division requested funds from the county for this move, but was turned down. The request will be made again as part of what is called the supplemental budget in the coming months, he said.

Beginning in July, before the final draft of the review was released, the division shifted a team of case managers to "clean up and close" what the review said were 46,000 open cases in 2002. The team has been dealing with an average of 1,500 cases a month, Watts said.

And the division is currently interviewing to hire six case managers and an auditor, funding for which was approved after the review was completed. The review recommended hiring a total of 61 employees -- something Watts said was unlikely in the near future. The division has 216 full-time employees, according to the review.

Nonetheless, between the improved systems capacity and the reduced caseload, the division hopes to raise its performance by 5 percent per year during the next three years in the areas of establishing paternities and handing down court orders for child support payments, Watts said. This increase would bring the division up to the national average in both areas.

As for the division's performance on collecting current child support -- which was at 43 percent in 2002, compared to a national average of 58 percent, according to the review -- Teuton said such measures as freezing assets without advance notice in cases where lots of money is owed should help. The division's attorneys are currently determining if that move would be legal, since there is disagreement among them about whether or not deadbeat parents realize their assets could be frozen when they sign paperwork related to paying child support, Watts said

The division is also seeking to use the actual wage-earning capacity of parents who don't respond to court orders in order to set the amount of child support payments, instead of what is called the Nevada average wage, or about $2,000 a month.

"We'd like to work with something closer to reality," he said.

The division's strategic plan will be completed in about six months, Watts said.

The review set a timeline in its recommendations that began in July and stretched out over two years.

"Some of the time frames they're working with are private sector, though -- not government," said Teuton.

In any case, he said, the goal is to get more single parents the money they need to raise their children.

"We don't like the predicament many people face any more than they do ... and given budgetary, technical and personnel resources available, our goal is to improve."