Conclusion

One of the nation's top academic experts on family policies has concluded that a likely explanation for California's failure to adequately collect child support is that the State's mediocre enforcement efforts were simply overwhelmed by the growing caseload.⁽¹³³⁾

Clearly, the challenge before child support officials grows in size each day. The challenge also is about to grow in importance, as federal and state welfare reforms push unemployed and low-income families to become more financially independent.

Because of prior failures and future obligations the State's Child Support Enforcement Program needs the concentrated attention of California's top policy makers. The government's effort and ingenuity need to be escalated to match the significance of the problem. Leadership needs to be mustered to develop a vision for an effective and efficient program.

In recent years, the child support program has been bolstered by considerable federal and state legislation -- attempting to give officials all of the technology and all of the legal authorities that government can muster to track down parents and collect support. The legislation has undoubtedly led to more collections in more cases.

But given the possibilities and the imperative, the progress is anemic. California has not seen the kind of synergistic returns on its investments that have been experienced in other states.

One fundamental problem is the requirement that disparate government agencies and private entities need to work in concert in order for the program to work. Simultaneously, parents, neighbors and employers all have to support the public efforts -- much as the public helps in other crime fighting efforts. These demands require an extraordinary amount of leadership in order for reforms to be implemented successfully.

The program also lacks the most basic methods for accountability -- at the county level and at the state level. Programs cannot be managed without good information. Information is the first step toward rewarding real success and sanctioning provable neglect. Information is essential to replicate what works and repair what does not.

In this vacuum of evidence, defenders and critics of the enforcement program have engaged in a time-consuming debate over the division of labor between the State and the counties. The debate will only increase as technology redefines what is possible and federal requirements impose onto California methods that have worked in other states. Oftentimes this debate has been navigated by politics, requiring unnecessary deviations from what should be a commonly agreed-upon course -- the best alignment for the most collections to the most families.

To be certain, the Department of Social Service and its partners, the county district attorneys, have been preoccupied with the long-standing effort to implement a uniform computerized process. Conceptually, the Statewide Automated Child Support System could provide the efficiency of automation already experienced by some county-based computer systems while reducing the data and case management problems that have resulted from each county pursing child support cases independently. But the system has been so costly, so time-consuming and so difficult to implement that its ability to function -- let alone solve all of these other problems -- is in serious doubt.

Hope can be found in the local talent -- as represented in the California Council on Science and Technology -- that is available to help officials resolve the technological problems.

Hope also can be found in those counties where vision, political will and management talent have been united. To different degrees, these counties have borrowed from business the best available management techniques, technologies and procedures. From successful public programs, they have built coalitions of parents, judges, employers and other government agencies who now enthusiastically do what they can to hold parents responsible for their obligations.

This degree of change is not possible without dynamic leadership to break down institutional walls and overcome parochial thinking. It also may require more resources, or a reallocation of existing resources -- neither of which can be justified without the kind of detailed analysis that the Child Support Enforcement Program has lacked.

In short, for nearly as long as California has been a State it has been formal law that parents must provide for their children. The current crises of family is a test of the State's fidelity to that basic social tenet.