County May Release Child Support Data

If you owe child support and work for Los Angeles County--or for a company doing business with the county--the Board of Supervisors plans to make it easier to track you down.

The board instructed the district attorney’s office Tuesday to draft an ordinance requiring the county to submit identifying information about its 80,000 employees. Businesses with county contracts or licenses must do the same.

The proposed ordinance will allow the district attorney’s office to compare its database of delinquent parents with the list of county employees and those who work for county contractors. If the D.A.’s office finds a match, that employee’s wages can be tapped to pay off the unpaid child support. Employers who fail to make those deductions will face sanctions still to be determined.

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Los Angeles is the first county in the state to take this step. Currently, about $2 billion in unpaid child support is owed to approximately 700,000 children in the county, officials said.

Private businesses are required to report employment information to the state for child support enforcement. But local governments are exempt, making it difficult to track down deadbeat parents with government jobs.

“These children have a right to child support from their absentee parents,” said Dist. Atty. Gil Garcetti, who testified in support of the measure at the board’s meeting Tuesday. “Now we’re going to be able to look for these parents and say, ‘Pay up.’ ”

As one of the largest employers in the area, the county has a responsibility to help collect child support, board members said.

“We have an opportunity to do something very far-reaching here,” Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky said. “What’s being proposed here is that if you want to work for this county, or you want to do business for this county, you better pay what you owe in the way of child support.”

The board will vote on the ordinance in the next two months.

Advocates of child support enforcement welcomed Tuesday’s action, adding that welfare reform has added a new impetus to collect delinquent payments.

“Lack of support is a leading cause of welfare dependency,” said Sue Berry, state president of the Assn. for Children for Enforcement of Support. “This step is putting a priority on our children. Child support must pick up momentum, especially if these families are going to survive.”

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The county’s action mirrors an executive order President Clinton signed in February 1995 that requires federal employees to pay child support as a condition of employment. The city of Chicago passed a similar law in 1996.

The district attorney’s office said the measure will help locate the thousands of parents skipping payments--nearly 70% of those with child support cases in the county.

“This will be a big boon to us,” said Wayne Doss, director of the district attorney’s Bureau of Family Support Operations.

“Unlike private employers, employment status is not routinely reported by municipal governments and county governments,” he said. “Some of the very data we rely on to find people in the private sector is not available to us.”

Under the proposed ordinance, the county will also ask local cities to consider passing similar laws.