Child Support Agency Cover-up

(Dayton, OH) This report from the Dayton Daily News (free reg.) is troubling. It appears that the Montgomery County Child Support Enforcement Agency mistakenly collected and distributed $17,000 in child support payments. The overpayment occurred due to an unauthorized garnishment order in November 1997 and it wasn't detected until this month. Typically, when administrative errors are made, they are corrected. However, in this case,

[The agency] ordered the creation of a false document dating to Dec. 1, 1997, that eradicated the overpayment, agency officials confirmed. The figures in the computer system were then altered on April 16 to reflect the false order.

Instead of an overpayment, the altered figures showed the man owed $5,000 in back payments.

[ ... ]

When the error was finally discovered this month, agency employees created a phony adjustment order, on a form that was not available until 1999, and backdated it to Nov. 3, 1997. It was signed by an agency employee who would have been a teenager at the time.

Let's analyze this case. The child support agency showed a certain level of incompetence by allowing the problem to go unnoticed for over six years. Then, instead of correcting the problem, the agency decided to make everything worse with a cover-up, a cover-up that displayed absolute ineptitude.

Doug Thompson, Director of the Child Support Enforcement Agency, has responded to the situation with an apparent desire to continue the buffoonery.

"I wouldn't call it a cover up. There are technical and legal issues with that case where it went from an overpayment to an arrearage."

Okay, Mr. Thompson, it wasn't a cover-up. It was a conspiracy by government officials to intentionally falsify documents for the purpose of hiding gross organizational incompetence that was allowed to continue for over six years. Does that sound better?