The Detroit Free Press reports on the state’s continuing errors in processing child support.
Wendy Wendland-Bowyer writes (excerpt):
When Michigan changed the way it manages child support payments on Oct. 1, going from separate county-run computers to a state-run system, parents suddenly found themselves in a morass.
Money taken out of noncustodial parents’ checks didn’t get to their kids. Parents with two children suddenly were listed as having one more. Some were shown to be in arrears when they weren’t. County Friend of the Court offices were unable to do much more than direct clients to the state.
“It is very frustrating,” said Melissa Scharrer, the Livingston County friend of the court.
Marilyn Stephen, director of the state Family Independence Agency’s office of child support, acknowledged the problems. She said her office is working aggressively to fix them, but it could be months before the system is operating more smoothly.
Stephen said some of the problems are tied to data errors from combining so many systems. For example, if one county listed an employer as Target and another county called it Target Inc., the computer treated it as two different employers, Stephen said.
Add problems such as the computer creating extra child support cases for some people and false arrearages for others, and what’s left is a cleanup that’s tedious, time-consuming and, by some estimates, likely to cost tens of millions of dollars to fix, officials said.
Another complication has been a change in computer vendors. Policy Studies Inc.of Denver, the contractor that got the computer system running, lost the bid to maintain it to the lower-bidding Accenture of Detroit. That means Accenture is learning the system, too. All of this leaves James Alexander, chief judge of the Oakland County Family Court, worried about accuracy.