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GCN Home > 10/13/03 issue

Child support gets a support system

By Vandana Sinha, GCN Staff

OCSE, working with states, builds a better tracking system

For five years, Northern California child support enforcement officials tried to collect child support checks from a surgeon whose debts topped $300,000 and whose home address kept shifting.

Late in 1999, they found his bank account and automatically levied more than $91,000 from it. His ex-wife and two children received more than $72,000.

Officials denied another nonpaying parent’s passport application because he owed $39,000 in child support. He paid the debt to clear the documents in time to fly to Finland and meet his new in-laws.

The 3-year-old Federal Parent Locator Service network made the critical discoveries in both cases.

The locator service has opened up lines of communication among four federal agencies, the 50 states and four territories, and thousands of employers and financial institutions.

Composed of several databases that were pieced together in December 1999, the service has given state enforcers more ways to find nonpaying parents who try to elude their responsibilities.

The job formerly took months or years of investigation.

Long arm of the law

“It used to be that the noncustodial parent left the state, and there was very little you could do about it,” said Michele Monahan, director of information and analysis for child support enforcement at Massachusetts’ Revenue Department. “You were pretty much useless.”

That changed with the 1996 Welfare Reform Act, which mandated a uniform database system that would extend beyond state borders.

Led by the federal Office of Child Support Enforcement and housed at the Social Security Administration’s national computer center in Baltimore, the locator service compiles and shares every state’s data about nonpaying parents.

The service uses Computer Associates International Inc.’s eTrust CA-Top Secret access control and virtual private network technology. The OCSE system was designed by Lockheed Martin Corp. and is managed by SRA International Inc. of Fairfax, Va.

The locator service keeps each certified state database up to date about parental hirings, tax refunds, passport applications, bank accounts, quarterly wages, unemployment insurance and active child support cases. The updates arrive daily or quarterly, depending on when the data becomes available.

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