 Welcome to Sheboygan County government working for you. My name is Adam Payne, Sheboygan County Administrator and co-host of this program with Chairman Mike Van der Steen. And today we're very pleased to have one of our 22 department heads with us, Mr. Jim Groff, our Child Support Director. Jim, it's good to have you with us. Thank you, it's nice to be here. I'm glad I could attend. Jim has been the Child Support Director, I think for 19 years, over 20 years with Sheboygan County, very experienced, very knowledgeable, and it has the important task of overseeing a department that is providing financial support for children and families. And so we're pleased to have Jim here to talk a little bit about the roles and responsibilities of the Child Support Department. Jim, please set the stage by sharing with our viewers a little bit about yourself and how you came to work for Sheboygan County and if you're from the area. Well, I'm from Kiel originally, which is 20 miles west of here, I believe it is. And I grew up in Kiel and attended schools in Appleton as well as in, I went to Lakeland and finished my degree there. And I've been in Child Support as you said for 19 years and two additional years in Health and Human Services as their accounting manager. I've been running the agency and I'm happy to say we've been doing very well as far as meeting the goals that we've set and working with all our customers as we like to call them because we try not to use any negative sayings about people that do pay child support and those that collect it also. What is the mission of the Child Support Department? The mission of our agency is, I have to read it, I'm sorry, but it's too long, I should shorten it, but to ensure adequate financial and medical support for families through an aggressive approach in locating obligors, establishing and enforcing court order, child support and medical coverage, and in obtaining child support orders as well as establishing paternity and help families reduce their reliance on public assistance and achieve financial independence. You are absolutely right. Thank you. We need to reduce the length of that mission statement. That is too much of a mouthful. A lot of information contained just in that statement itself. Please share a little bit about the roles and responsibilities of your department. What is it that your staff are doing? Okay, number one, their main goal, I have two people working on this establishing paternity for our non-marital children, it's called. We also establish other court orders for all our other cases. We establish orders for those people that do not have children, but have separated and no longer want to live together. We make sure that all the children are covered by some type of insurance. If the couples or the non-custodial parent or the custodial parent cannot afford it or have it at their place of work, we make sure that the children are eligible to go on badger care or one of the other state programs that do cover them within insurance. We place children in foster care as well as kinship care, and we enforce all the family support orders and monitor those orders to make sure that payments are coming in as they're supposed to. Is that all? No, there's a few other things we do, but they come along as things happen. If people do not pay and so forth, we have other processes that we have to follow up on. We do have an administrative process that we use to take away people's driver's license as well as their hunting license and business license in some cases. We also have the authority to intercept taxes or tax refunds. We work with banks to freeze bank accounts when necessary, and we do. A lot of different things. And of course, when I said is that all, I was kidding, because there's a tremendous amount going on in your department. Very complex, and as you said earlier, you're not always giving the most pleasant information or necessarily working with the most pleasant people. People, often that contact to your department are hurting or concerned about their finances or concerned about getting financial support for their children, so your staff certainly have a difficult, challenging job. How many staff do you have in the department and what is their average case load? We have 16 full-time equivalents as far as staff goes, and then we also have one limited term employee that really works 37 and a half hours a week, so she is also almost full-time. Their present case load, the two paternity specialists that I have have a case load of about 250 to 300 cases where they're constantly working on and moving them through the system. And then the non-support workers where the other child support workers have about 600 cases each, and there's seven of them. So we have a total of about 5,000 cases that we operate. Sheboygan County is about the 12th largest child support agency in the state. In addition to those, we also have what is known as private cases, private child support cases where the couples that are separating or have children usually have their own attorneys, and all we do is make sure that the money is collected and redistributed to the proper people in those cases. One of the, as you know, one of the unique things about your department is that you don't rely on property tax levy as much as 20 of the 22. The Register of Deeds, as you know, is another department that doesn't rely on any property tax levy. You utilize very little. If it isn't property tax levy that's funding your department operations and your staff, please share or explain where are you getting revenue to be able to do the work that you do? As part of the Child Support Act that is passed by the government, we're funded by both the federal and the state government. 66% of every dollar we spend, or I should say every dollar the county spends on the Child Support Program, is reimbursed through the federal government. And then we also earn incentives and are eligible for various grants that we can obtain through both the state and federal government. And all in all, they supply us about 91% of our revenue. The other 9% comes from the tax levy. And for 2009, that's about $55,000. Which is where we'd like to keep it. We're working on that also. So your total budget is? About a million, two. About a million, two. And I know I'm hitting a cold with this question. So if you don't have it in the memory, I understand. But a million dollars or so to support your department, how much is actually flowing through your department that you're helping get into the hands of families to support children? We do about seven, I would say $7 million a quarter goes through, well, we don't actually accept the money in white. Years ago, we used to, Shlory and County used to pay and collect child support. Now, there's a centralized system, which is located in Milwaukee, called the Wisconsin Collection Trust Fund. And they collect and distribute all of the child support. We still have maybe a couple hundred thousand that comes through the county. But there again, it comes into our office and the next day it's sent out to Milwaukee to the trust fund. So most of it you're facilitating getting through through that. And you said $7 million roughly a quarter? About every quarter, yeah. So almost $28 million, $30 million a year is going through the pipeline because of the work that you and your staff do. Correct. Very good, thank you, Jim. Jim, let's talk about a few examples of the important work that's done in your department so our viewers can better understand the functions there. With regard to a divorce, when there's children present, what level of involvement do you have in your department with that divorce? Once the divorce is final, that's when we come into play. The judges will automatically refer people to our department and they have to fill out an application. One of them has to fill out the application and supply a $25 fee unless they are indigent and at that particular time the fee is waived and then they fill out the questionnaire and what we do is we go through the process and we get all the information from both the parents to find out who makes what and what it all is and we calculate, we still use a percentage order calculation but all our orders are a straight dollar amount either bi-weekly or weekly or semi-monthly or sometimes monthly that is paid and we calculate that all out, prepare a work list for each of the parties to look at and in some cases we ask them to stipulate if they're in agreement to what we came up with, if there's just no way that they're going to agree to what we've developed as far as payments and insurance coverage and so forth, then we send it to court and the court process is probably very slow we are trying to work on more administrative processes to help speed things up because right now we're scheduling court hearings into July so even though we have five branches that we utilize in Sheboygan County there's still a waiting list to get into the various branches. And now if someone has issues on custody or visitation how does your department get involved in helping them with those items? The issue of visitation and custody is something that we do not handle but we refer them to the Clicker Courts Office who in turn will refer them to the Family Court Commissioner so that they're handled down there and our Family Court Commissioner has office hours set up that they will go through and explain the process that needs to be done for custody and visitation rights. Okay now if someone would come into your department who was pregnant and not sure who the father was how do you get involved to help them out? There are two ways. Normally they come in when they are pregnant yet and they're looking so we do a preliminary interview and the preliminary interviewers ask them in-depth questions as to who they possibly have slept with or who could possibly be the father. Their activity during the last six, eight months and so forth and then we load that all in and we try to locate who may be the father of the child or in some cases if the child's already born and the father comes in and says I'm looking for the mother of this child. You'd expect them to know it but we've had two cases this past year where we needed to find the mother because she was no longer living in Wisconsin or in the States as a matter of fact. So we just went back and looked and looked and looked and we did find one but I don't think we found the other yet. But in the case of a pregnancy we wait until the child is born and then if by then the father still hasn't shown up the hospital will give its voluntary paternity registration form. It's where the mother signs the form and says this is who I believe the father is and so forth. And if the father happens to be there he can sign also and declare himself the father. And at that point in time all we have to do is process paperwork to get his name on the birth certificate and so forth. But if he isn't there and we're looking for him then like I said we get the information that she'd given us previously and we go through it again if there's any new information that she has or maybe she ran into him or one of his relatives or friends or something and found out where he's living then we will contact him serving with papers so that he does come to a preliminary court hearing and we set things up that way. And it's a process that hopefully will be done within three to six weeks but sometimes it's three to four months. Okay. Now if most of our viewers I think have the view that the child support agency is mostly working with fathers to collect the support payments for the children when they're divorced. Could you really mention this Wisconsin support collections trust? How does this work in conjunction with that program? That's where all the funds are collected and sent to on a daily basis as soon as we get them or any of the other 71 counties. And now three of the tribes I believe in Wisconsin have also been sending their funds through the Wisconsin Collection Trust Fund. So there's about 75 different units that are sending in this money. And the money is distributed based on coupons that are filled out by the absent parent. And he fills in there where the money is supposed to go. And the money goes that way unless there's somebody that keys something wrong or something like that. And then we get an air listing on a daily basis that says, okay, if something was not done with this money where is it supposed to go? And it hangs out there until we find out what it's supposed to be or where it's supposed to go and then we have to make adjustments to the count to get it to the right place. So once we put it to the right place then hopefully everybody is happy but most of the time payers aren't happy. Now do you get calls from some of the mothers asking where their check is sometimes? A lot of times because there's so many things that can happen to payments because of the fact if they're used to getting it for, let's say a two month period or something like that every other week on a Wednesday, let's say. If that check isn't there they're gonna be on the phone calling us. And then we have to explain to them what may have happened. Like holidays are a big thing that caused them to be late. We're trying to work around that by encouraging them to take out debit cards so that the funds are transferred immediately into Chase Bank which is the overseeing bank of our debit card process. And then that way it's there within 24 hours. A lot of people want to do that and still don't want to. So then we ask if they have a checking account, many do, many don't. And if they have a checking account we'll try and convince them that should be put in there and not only saves us time and the trust fund time but it saves the state funds because for every check they cut they have to pay an amount to the trust funds. Sure, now if there's a court order you get involved in the enforcement when individuals don't comply. Yes we do, if a court order isn't adhered to we'll get a call more than likely from the custodial parent and she or he will tell us that they didn't receive their money and we have to wait at least 30 days when there's been no contact and so forth. And then at that time what we can do is we can find out what the problem seems to be. If it is necessary we can have the person served and have them come into a court hearing and if that doesn't do any good and it goes on and continues to be an issue what we can do is turn it over to our attorney and have them issue a contempt order so that they are arrested and either put in jail until they can have their court hearing or they go to jail immediately and sit there and wait depending upon how their court order was written because some court orders are written that if they fail to pay they will be arrested and placed in jail. The other thing is that if it gets down to it where we just can't find people or we're not doing anything we can always turn it over to the district attorney's office and he can issue a criminal warrant to have them picked up criminally. And then Jim what would happen if one or the other parties move out of state? Is that something where your department still stays involved with this or does it eventually get handed off to another entity like yours in another state? We stay involved as long as there is at least the child living in Wisconsin. If the whole family would move to a different state then at that particular time if the one or the other parent wishes they can have their order, their venue change to another state. Most of the time it doesn't happen because Wisconsin probably follows up more on their cases than many other states do. We are close to being number one in collections and establishing support orders. So it's good to be from Wisconsin when you have or are in need of child support agency. And then is there a time limit on child support orders from the court either in age or other time that they place on these? Child support payments are, you need to make child support payments until the child is of age and has graduated from high school. So here in Wisconsin it would be 18 and a graduate of high school. So he or she could still collect child support until the age of 19. But that would be as long as they can. And you can always collect on arrears if you do fall into or if they fell into an arreared situation where they didn't pay and they had money coming from one parent or the other. We can continue to collect that for them up until the youngest child is 39. Okay, all right, Adam, back to you. I'm wondering if you should explain arrears a little bit. Probably, arrears is what we call when someone does not pay or when somebody doesn't pay what has been ordered to pay, if he only pays let's say $300 of a $500 order, then $200 is what is known as a rearage. So that goes into a separate account and stays there because whenever child support is paid the current child support is always paid first. And the other child support is held in this account until an additional payment is made. And that amount is also subject to right now it's a 1% interest per month. Soon they will be changing that to a half a percent rather than a 1% because of the economy. Speaking of the economy in earlier, you mentioned that you receive most of your funding through the federal and state government and our viewers don't need to hear because they're seeing it and they're feeling it that the economy is in rough shape. And when you talk about budgets, though Sheboygan County's got a pretty good track record, we rely a lot on the state. And as you well know, Jim, the state's track record, their budget deficits, the federal's track record and the budget deficit at the national level, it's terrible, it's absolutely terrible. Most of our departments, other than registered deeds and to a certain extent your department aren't relying on the state as much as they are tax levy but based on what's all happening at the state and federal level to get to the point, to get to the question, how do you see it impacting your department? Is the federal stimulus funds gonna help or hinder? Is the state budget deficit, again the 15th year that we've been dealing with a state budget deficit, is that gonna negatively impact your department? I'm happy to say it should not at least for the next two years. What happened is back three years ago in 2006, there was a deficit reduction act that was signed into law and at that particular time, child support agencies throughout Wisconsin lost about five and a half million dollars. Well at that particular time the state looked at it and they said, well, we should be able to cover some of that and our money is matchable so for every dollar that they put in, they could collect two from the feds at that particular time. So once they put in some funding that was subject to match from the feds, we were kept whole as much as possible by the state. Now this year the state said, we can't do that anymore because of their situation but what happened is President Obama signed the American Recovery and Reduction Act, I think it's called and with that, he has given some additional funds or allocated some additional funds to all child support agencies throughout the United States. Sure, you're not sure. The state of Wisconsin has received a grant or a stimulus package of about eight and a half million dollars for federal fiscal year 2009 as well as for 2010 that will run out until, that will run out in September of 2010 and with that we've spent a lot of meetings with the Wisconsin Child Support Association as to what we're gonna do with that and what's gonna happen is that we're hoping that we're gonna be allowed to expand that through at least December of 2010 to cover us as far as our year goes which would be beneficial and because we're starting on the back side basically of federal fiscal year 2009, we missed the opportunity to use some of these funds from October of 2008 through this month now of 2009. So what we're hoping to do is that we'll be able to use at the back end of 2010. Now we requested that information but right now it looks as though Sheboygan County will be getting the majority of that funding. It could be as much as $130,000 but there again the state is looking at some of that for some of the projects they would like to do or they wouldn't like to use some of those funds for a statewide project. One of them had been a statewide call center but that was voted down and they will not have a statewide call center because presently there are three individual call centers that various county agencies can ask to join. So the good news is even though we're doing deficit spending at the federal level and at the state level Sheboygan County child support should be okay through 2010. Correct. At least that's our hope. That's our hope and the big thing is the funds are there but it has to be used for the child support program and at all possible it has to be used to increase employment. Now I don't believe we need additional employees at the present time because we've got enough work to keep everybody busy and the only way I could have a need for additional employees is if we're gonna do some additional work on things then I don't wanna hire somebody for 18 months and then have to let them go because I know it's gonna be tough to do but I think with the staff that I have we can do things that might be a little slow up but one of our biggest things right now because of the economy here in Sheboygan County is we do what we call a review and adjust and that's part of the process that we have to do. It's usually something that's done every three years for most orders but you can do it every year upon request of either party. So this review and adjust means that we look at all the financial information of both parties and we put it together and we work on coming up with what is a fair amount to pay. Again, based on the 17% or 25% that we used to use but coming up with a straight dollar amount and right now we're getting about between 20 and 25 of these requests in a week whereas before the economy turned we were getting maybe three to five. Remarkable, three to five to 25 a week. That's remarkable and another indication that a lot of people are hurting. Yeah, definitely. Jim, we only have a couple of minutes left. Is there anything else you'd like to say about the department or your staff? Is there ever? Well, I just wanna thank my staff because they do a tremendous job and I know we do take a lot of calls and I know some can't even come over to your respective offices and most of those are complaint calls but we do what we can and the staff does an excellent job. We do and they do, we get crabby every once in a while. It may come across that they're being rude. They really don't mean that. They are just trying to do their job and one thing I guess that upsets them most is that when they give, when our receptionist answers the phone and gives them the information where they'll just continue keep calling and they'll get the same information from the next level and the next level and then if the supervisor answers the call they'll get that same information and if they finally come to me they'll get the same information that they got way back in the beginning. It's just a process that we have to go through and we have certain guidelines that we have to follow and it's what we do and we've all been doing it. I think I've only got, well my receptionist is only there a year but the rest of my staff have been there over 10 years that have been working for Sheboygan counties. Well, in the minute left, a lot of information, good information today. I know how hard your staff work and the very challenging job that they have and the important job they have. If folks have questions, if any of our viewers have questions or wanna make an adjustment because of the economy and they just got laid off, who should they call? What number should they call? They have to do requests in writing for the review and adjust. That's one of the process. Otherwise, if they just have questions, our number is 920-459-3041. We do have a fax number if they wanna fax a request for a review and adjust and that number is 920-4590-399 or we are on the county's website, which is www.co.sheboygan.wi.us and last of all, our email address is childsupport at co.sheboygan.wi.us. If they go to the website, are the numbers and the email addresses right there? Very pleased. Very good, very good. Well, Jim, thank you so much for joining us today. A lot of information, covered a lot of ground. Thank you for the work you and your staff do. And next week, or next month rather, we'll have another department that also doesn't rely on a lot of property tax levy. So we'll be two for two and that's our register of deeds, Ellen Schleicher. So until then, thanks for joining us.