BOISE (AP) -- The state of Idaho chased 1,400 alleged deadbeat dads last spring who didn't actually owe any child support money.
Those cases should have been closed, for reasons ranging from the dads having died to the kids having grown up. But parents continued to get bills and warnings from the state about delinquent payments.The problem turned up in a legislative audit of the Health and Welfare Department.
In the process of fixing it, Health and Welfare also discovered 10 percent of its child support cases, about 7,000 cases, should have been closed.
"There are some significant findings here that trouble me," Karl Kurtz, state Health and Welfare director, said last week.
"You have my word that we are in the process of evaluating each and every one of them and making some substantial changes," he told legislators.
The glitch is a blemish on the record of the state's highly rated child support enforcement program. The program had collected $77.2 million in less than a year as of Aug. 1. Child support consists of payments that courts order the noncustodial parent to pay.
The state has identified unpaid child support as the No. 1 reason families go on welfare in Idaho.
A spokesman said any parents who paid money they didn't owe will get refunds.
The problem developed because of a switch to a new automated system in 1996, Prisock said.
The child support files were correct before they were changed over. But the conversion threw off some of the data, and child support workers didn't notice.
From March to July, child support workers across the state checked every file, comparing the court order and other records to what the computer system said.
Because the computer didn't think the cases were closed, it kept tallying up monthly payments and past-due amounts, and automatically sending the parents bills and delinquency notices.
Complaints poured in to Health and Welfare offices.
"That clued us in to the fact that we had a pretty big problem," Prisock said.