Costly child-support system still 3 years away, SC agency says
A system for ensuring parents pay child support – costing more than $150 million and more than two decades overdue – is still three years from completion, S.C. lawmakers were Wednesday.
The S.C. Department of Social Services has been working on the system since Congress passed a 1988 law requiring all states to build systems to enforce the collection of child-support payments. The deadline to have an operating child-support system to 1997.
The last state to comply with the law, South Carolina has been fined $145 million since 1998 because its system is incomplete.
Vendors have paid about $98 million of the fines, according to a memo Social Services recently provided lawmakers. However, the state has spent more than $100 million on fines and to develop the system.
Completing the project will cost the state an additional $67 million. The state also is expected to pay more in fines until the project is finished.
Jimmy Early, the system’s project manager, told a panel of state senators who oversee Social Services that the project is on track to be completed in October 2018. Then, after training the 700 people who will operate the system, it will take another year to get it up and running.
Social Services has blamed legal disputes with companies hired to build the system for delaying its development.
After a long legal battle, the state reached a settlement last year with Hewlett Packard, the previous vendor, and entered a new contract with Xerox to develop the child-support system.
However, Gina Arnold, a Spartanburg County parent, told the Senate panel that three years is far too long to wait on the system.
“It does not take three years to write a program,” said Arnold, who said she struggles to collect child-support payments. “It does not take three years, 30 years, to get a system into place.”
Senators expressed frustration the system has taken so long to complete, encouraging Social Services to look for ways to speed up the process.
Jamie Self: 803-771-8658, @jamiemself
Agency making slow-steady improvements, director says
S.C. Department of Social Services Director Susan Alford called for a slow, steady roll out of a statewide system to screen calls reporting child abuse and neglect, while testifying Wednesday before a Senate oversight panel.
Social Services stopped its roll out of a statewide system after calls reporting abuse and neglect spiked 25 percent over the previous year. overwhelming the agency’s ability to handle the complaints. That system now covers about half the state’s counties.
The agency is trying to hire more caseworkers to screen calls before it finishes rolling out the system statewide, Alford said.
Ideally, Alford said she wants to begin a “slow roll out” next year of the call-in system to the state’s remaining counties.
“We're going to have to keep flying this plane and building it at the same time,” she said.
State Sen. Tom Young, R-Aiken, said the spike in calls shows that the statewide call-in system is catching cases that previously had fallen through the cracks. In counties where the system is not operating, “there may still be cases falling through the cracks,” he added.
However, Young also noted Social Services agency also still is trying to recover from a crisis created by assigning its workers too many cases. “We don't want a bunch of caseworkers with over 100 cases again.”
Alford told state senators that:
▪ 68 caseworkers statewide had more than 50 children in their caseloads as of Aug. 22, down from 77 in late June and 142 a year earlier; no caseworkers now are dealing with caseloads of 100 or more children. The goal is to get that number down to about two dozen children per worker.
▪ The turnover rate among child-welfare workers from April through June was 8.3 percent, up from 7.4 percent earlier this year but far lower than in 2014, when the state was losing droves of overworked caseworkers.
▪ Social Services needs to add 1,387 foster homes to its existing 1,444 foster homes
This story was originally published September 7, 2016 at 1:47 PM with the headline "Costly child-support system still 3 years away, SC agency says."