Many of you in viewing the mug shots here have commented about what appears to be a large number of detainees charged with non-support. Prosecuting Attorney Dwight Scroggins tells us the caseload for his Child Support Division is not unusually high.
“We’re a little bit up over last year,” Scroggins said in an interview. “But we’ve had years where we’ve had this many during the first half.
“My guess would be that by the end of 2012, it will all be fairly similar to what it’s been in the past.”
Scroggins says his office changed the way it handles child-support cases a little over ten years ago, taking over the entire operation, and having workers specialize in particular kinds of activity like wage withholding, out-of-state claims and the like.
In other jurisdictions, case workers in a state office handles much of the work, and only refers cases that require court appearances or filings. Scroggins says his way of doing business is much faster and yields better results. For example, when his office is alerted that a parent involved in a child-support case has a new job, the turnaround on wage-witholding filings is much quicker.
“That goes to our withholding specialist, who will have the withholding order done, signed and in the mail the same day in which we get the alert,” Scroggins said. “I would say on average that’s probably a two to three-week process in most offices.”
Scroggins says when a parent is late with child support, his specialists can simply walk across the office to the enforcement division to begin criminal proceedings. It takes a lot longer for state child-support offices to refer the case to a prosecutor.
“That process takes a couple of weeks to go from that state worker to the prosecutor’s office,” Scroggins said, “and, it may be another two or three weeks before the charge is ever filed.”
“In our office, the girl on one side of our office says ‘this guy didn’t pay this month, and we need to do something.’ She’ll send that over to the enforcement side, and we will be having that reviewed by a prosecutor within two days of passage of the non-payment timeline.”
The numbers are impressive. Scroggins says his “Henry Ford approach” to child-support generates about 13-point-five million dollars per year in otherwise non-voluntary payments. He says they turn between 60 and 63 percent of their caseload into paying cases. Jurisdictions under the old system are closer to 40 percent.
According to Rebecca Woelfel at the Missouri Department of Social Services, there are five counties in the state in which the PA’s office does most of the work. They are Audrain, Buchanan, Butler, Clay and Montgomery counties.
Woelfel provided some numbers for comparison.
As of May 31, 2012, here are the caseloads for those counties:
Audrain: 1403
Buchanan: 5485
Butler: 2654
Clay: 7480
Montgomery: 610
The collections for State Fiscal Year 2011 are:
Audrain $2,520,889
Buchanan $13,411,760
Butler $4,134,818
Clay $23,102,362
Montgomery $1,285,808
Statewide $664,136,608
Scroggins says those numbers only represent cases with collection problems.
“The only cases we have are cases in which we have had a collection problem. That 13.5 million dollars is just a portion of the overall child support that’s paid in Buchanan County. The rest of it is paid by non-custodial parents who are supporting their children, who are making the effort to pay on their own.”