Roughly one in six people living in Buchanan County are affected at any given time by the activities of a team tasked with enforcing child support orders. The group has surpassed all other counties in the state in total collections for at least the last decade.
Prosecuting Attorney Dwight Scroggins says the Child Support Enforcement Unit handles around 5,000 active cases at any given time. That’s five thousand parents ordered to pay child support, plus five thousand parents expecting to receive those payments, plus at least five thousand children, and likely a lot more.
“They go in the system, they get off, they go back in the system. We get a lot of repeat offenders,” says unit director Melinda Graff. “We also get a lot of new people when they’re just starting out with their child-support orders that get into that criminal system pretty quickly.”
That’s borne out by numbers from the unit’s in-house genetic testing services, showing 450 new orders and modifications established by office staff last year.
“Generally speaking, we maintain pretty much the number one position, in all apples-to-apples comparisons to level one, two or three offices,” he says
The $12.7 million collected last year represents just over half of the total amount owed last year. It’s a slight drop from the $12.8 million collected the year before, and a drop of just under two million dollars from 2008, the best year ever for the office. The total arrearage in Buchanan County was $23 million. The total amount of child support payments in arrears across Missouri last year was $2.47 billion.
Scroggins credits his staff for the success of his office, and singles out the unit’s director Melinda Graff.
“I don’t think there are more offenders in Buchanan County than there are in other places,” Graff says. “I just think that our office works the cases differently, we’re more proactive.”
“If they miss a month, they can be charged with a misdemeanor. We watch arrearages,” Graff says . “If their arrearages that are equal to 12 months of their order they can be charged with a felony.”
In 2015, 394 felony and 431 misdemeanor charges were filed. There are currently 1,400 non-support defendants on probation, and in 2015, approximately 51 non-support defendants were committed to jail or prison.
Another way to get the offenders’ attention involves their driver’s licenses. Graff says there were 125 driver’s license suspensions issued last year, with mixed results. “What we find is that a lot of our offenders don’t have driver’s licenses,” she says, “so there isn’t a license to suspend.”
But Scroggins says a lot of those defendants need their DLs.
“It is effective with people who are conscious of being at risk of getting stopped and arrested for driving without a license,” he says. “And it’s effective for people whose license is necessary for them to have employment.”
Scroggins says they’ve had to do more with less because of a dramatic reduction in their staff over the last ten years.
“Ten years ago I had 32 people doing child support collection on a very similar type of caseload,” Scroggins says. “I have 17 people doing collections now.”