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The Associated Press
Tuesday, February 08, 2005
Clash between state, contractor throws child support into chaos
A clash between the state attorney general's office and a contractor has created chaos in the system that gets child-support checks to the families of thousands of divorced North Texans.
For more than 15 years, the courts in Dallas and Collin counties have appointed McKinney-based Child Support Systems to relay, record and track child-support payments.
Now, the company and the state are battling over who should control those payments. The Dallas Morning News reported in Tuesday's editions that the result has been extremely short checks for some families and threats of contempt of court charges for delinquent child support against breadwinners who have made their payments.
The newspaper reports that almost 2,000 divorced Collin and Dallas county couples have had their payments and records shuttled between the attorney general's office and Child Support Systems.
Kathleen Crabtree and her two children recently received a child-support check for $8.64, about $180 short. Her ex-husband, Mike Martin, was accused of contempt of court after his payment record was erroneously flagged as 17 months overdue.
"We have a good relationship, and this threatened that," Ms. Martin told the newspaper. "He thought it was my doing, at first."
The company, run by Robert T. O'Donnell, charges each divorced couple a flat $10-a.m.onth fee.
But in 1996, the federal government began ordering states to manage child-support payments themselves to improve compliance with child-support orders.
By 2002, the attorney general's office began intercepting payments that had been going through Child Support Systems. The state sent the money directly to the parents.
O'Donnell said that, because he was court-appointed to the cases, he has the right to reclaim the cases and recoup the fees he lost when the state took over. He sued the state in federal court in November 2003 over the issue.
Recently, he said the attorney general's office rerouted more than 900 payments back to his office with no explanation. Since last fall, his firm has been working to recover back fees from clients, sometimes from the support checks themselves.
That has led to the short checks, and in some cases to contempt citations against wage-earners for delinquent payments.
Rodger Pilson of Sugar Land had his child-support payments sent automatically to his wife in Dallas . So he was shocked to learn in June that he was delinquent. Before the matter was straightened out, Pilson had to drive six hours to McKinney for a court hearing that was postponed.
"I have done nothing wrong. I'm not in contempt of anything or anybody. I was caught between the county and the state, and they can do it again if they want," he said.
Janece Keetch, a spokeswoman for the attorney general's office, declined to say why the payments were rerouted back through O'Donnell. The News reported that State District Judge Nathan White, senior judge in Collin County , has not responded to its requests for interviews.
However, a ruling is expected soon in O'Donnell's lawsuit, the newspaper reported. Keetch said the state hopes that resolves the dispute "as quickly as possible, not only for the good of the parents, but even more importantly for all the families involved.