 Welcome to Sheboygan County government working for you. My name's Adam Payne. I'm the Sheboygan County Administrative Coordinator. And with me today is Jim Groff, the Director of the Child Support Enforcement Agency. My co-host, Dan Lemmy-Hugh, could not be with us today, but certainly we have a lot of information to cover and we'll get right to it. Jim is one of 23 departments, department heads overseeing one of 23 departments and has been with the county for some time. And why don't we begin by, Jim, why don't you tell us a little bit about yourself and your roles and responsibilities? Sure, thank you for allowing me to be here and letting you know about what child support is all doing and about myself. I appreciate that opportunity. I've been with the county approximately 14 years, a little bit more. Two years as Health and Human Services Accounting Manager, and then I transferred over to the Child Support Agency where I've been for the last 12 years. Our role as far as child support goes is to oversee the operation of the county's 4D program, which is the Child Support Enforcement Program. And we report, basically, to three different entities, not only the county board of supervisors and yourself, but also to the state and federal governments because each of them play a strategic part in the program that we offer to the residents of Sheboygan County. We are authorized as part of the Social Security Act and that's why we're called the 4D Agency because our authorization comes from Section 4, Part D, of the Social Security Act. And then we also sign a state and county contract with the Brewer of Child Support at the state level and we're responsible for establishing paternity for unwed people. Let me stop you right there for a minute because right now our viewers are probably saying, what are we talking about here? Let's break it out. Child Support Agency, you've been with the county for 14 years. And let's start real simple. What is the mission of the Child Support Agency? Our mission is to ensure adequate financial and medical support for families through an aggressive approach in locating obligors, establishing and enforcing court orders for child support and medical support and to establish paternity and child support collections for non-marital children. Very good, very good. And for the last 12 years, you've been the director of the program. Correct. How many staff do you have? I have 16 full-time equivalents and one LTE. 16 full-time people are divided up between administrative jobs, specialist work, case management work and financial work. Now, you have one of the more, I think, challenging roles in the county, working with child support and enforcement. And often when I think of the Child Support Department, I think of following up with deadbeat dads or people that aren't providing support for their children. Give me a little bit of a flavor for the roles and responsibilities of your department. What are your staff involved with? Okay, first of all, we don't call anybody deadbeat dads because it's offensive to them. Yes, my apology. And according to the state, they've mandated to us that we're supposed to become kinder and gentler and treat people as customers rather than as enemies. And we try to express that to the people we work with because often we are, and my staff are caught in the middle and you have one parent calling and screaming and yelling because they aren't getting the money and another parent calling and screaming because they're paying too much money and you're caught in between with the children who you're really there to serve. And that's the bottom line, making sure that the children get the financial assistance, the medical assistance that they need. So let's turn back to your staff. You said 14 staff. Talk a little bit about their, or 16. Talk a little bit about their roles and responsibilities. Sure, we have nine specialists, excuse me. The specialists are charged with establishing either paternity or various orders for the collection of child support. I have two paternity people. They take cases according to the last name of the mother of the child and it's broken down pretty much so that each one of the paternity specialists has approximately 250 cases. And then there are seven non-support specialists that we call and they each have approximately 550 to 600 cases that they are working on throughout the year. They're responsible for making sure that the court orders are established on a timely basis and that health insurance is established for the care of the child and enforcing and in some cases reviewing a court order to make sure that it's not financially hurting either parent. How many specialists working with caseloads? Nine altogether. Nine and they have between, you said five and 600 case? Correct, except the paternity people who a paternity case is a lot more complex than a non-support. There's a lot of work that goes into that. There's several interviews before the child is born, after the child is born, locating and naming a father on the birth certificate are all things that the paternity people have to go. And that's one reason their caseload is approximately 250 rather than the five to 600 that the other specialists have. And one of the staff support people you have is the child support enforcement attorney. Correct. What is her role? Well, she not only is used in the child support agency, she's also an assistant corporation counsel and her role as that is to take care of the chapter 51's 55 orders which are for placement and I just forgot, but, and then the most of her responsibility is for child support and child support, she acts as the state and she basically is more or less interested in, well, I shouldn't say more or less, she is totally interested in what the state would like to see done as far as the establishment of borders and she represents the best interest of the child. A lot of people are confused and concerned because they feel that, well, she's there with either the custodial parent or the non-custodial parent and she's not representing or has any association with either one of those. She's a representative of the state and works on the best interest of the child. Now, one of 23 county departments, 16 staff. What's the operating budget for the department? What kind of revenue and expenditures do you have flowing through your department? We have, our 2002 budget was just over a million dollars and of that, we generate revenue from three different sources. The first one and the largest one is from the state. They contribute 66% of any dollar we spend, 66% is returned to us by the state because we're all part of the TANF program and funds that is used for reimbursement purposes. So right now we're getting 66% back from the state then there's another approximately 24% that comes from various incentives that we can earn by establishing paternity or making collections or creating health insurance orders or medical assistance orders. And then the final 10% or less than that depending upon what our incentives are come from the county government who give us 10% for tax. Now when you say about a million dollars for the department, is that for operations or does that include the money that you're fording on or facilitating that gets in the hands of parents and their children? No, that's just the operations, a million dollars to operate it. The monies that we collect or help collect, I should say, no longer come to Sheboygan County, they come to, it's called the Wisconsin Collection Trust Fund and that's located in Milwaukee. All collections for child support or spousal support or medical assistance or anything like that funnel through that trust fund. And I think that's a big misnomer out there. I think a lot of our viewers and people in the community may call your department and say, hey, where's my check, send my check to me and it frankly isn't coming into the hands of you or your staff. Again, you're facilitating or following through to make sure that the money is appropriately forwarded on and timely. Correct, we, oh, it was, I would say probably at least 15, 16 years that we collected money through Sheboygan County itself. So in 1998, when the state created this trust fund and said from now on, local agencies, you will no longer collect any cash unless there's a specific reason and those would include if somebody was paying off all their accounts and they came in and said, here's the money, take it. We're not gonna give it away. We'd much rather take it, accept it, reseed it, and then send it back to the trust fund and then have them distributed to the proper sources, be it the mother or the child or to pay off some birth expenses or any arrearages that maybe do either to the mother or to the state or something like that. So we're not gonna turn money away if they come in but we are not supposed to be collecting any money because that is supposed to be done through the trust fund. And that's a good segue to giving the viewers a better feel for some of the services that you provide, the people that you're working with. And let's work with a couple of examples. For example, give our viewers a better sense of, in case of divorce, do you work with all people when they're getting divorced and have children or in what cases would you work with a situation? Well, we first start working or establishing a case when the couple has received their divorce and they must have children in order for us to work on it. And now the couple has a choice. They can either go with our services which require them to fill out an application for services after the divorce, pay a $20 fee and have an order that is a dollar amount order because we just had an edict that started in May of last year that said we had to convert all our percentage orders which were set at 17% or 25% depending upon the number of children to a straight dollar amount. And so we've been working on that for the last six, eight months. And so that's one of the new criteria that we established to open up a case. We wanna make sure that those orders are already a dollar amount order because we have until September of this year to finish that conversion work. So anyone in this community that gets divorced and has children, are they identified as a case in your department or do you work with those individuals in all instances? We could, but the only ones that we get automatically referred to us are those that have some sort of medical assistance attached to them if they're using medical assistance or if they're using badger care or healthy start or something like that through the Department of Economic Support. We in turn get an automatic referral saying you need to establish an order to recoup some of these costs that have been paid off by the state. So earlier when I made the inappropriate comment of deadbeat dads, and again I do think a lot of viewers and a lot of people think, well that's what child support is about, is following up on parents or fathers that aren't fulfilling their obligation. But that really isn't fair. I mean it's much broader than that. Another example, say a young woman comes to the office, she's pregnant and she says that I'm not married, I'm looking for help, is there any assistance that can be provided? Sure, again we ask her, the first question is are you presently receiving any type of medical assistance or anything like that because if she does get that then we waive the application fee. But she still needs to fill out an application and then there's an interview that's conducted with her to try and get as much information as we can because the only way we can do our job is if we communicate with the mother, the child to find out number one where she met the person if she doesn't know who he is and gather any information that we can. Either a friend of hers introduced her and she knows him so that we can follow up and try and identify who the father may be. What if the person doesn't know who the father is? It makes it very difficult, number one, and we still take the case and we try for, we're able to get it to try for approximately three years to try and identify who the father is. If you can identify who the father is, is there any support that can still be provided? Any financial support? Not by anyone outside the agency or excuse me, not by anyone like a father unless somebody is willing to admit they are. There is state funding available, but it's getting less and less to do that. We used to have AFDC and that's been changed now to W2 but that program, the W2 program is still available and is used periodically but we keep working until we can find something and all of a sudden somebody will remember something and we'll go with that. And we're picking on dad here. Let's turn the tables. A young man comes in carrying a child and is separated or going through a divorce. Same situation, you would follow up with the mother and look at income levels and determine how much should be provided. Correct, we do that also and that's why when you were saying deadbeat dads before I was gonna say sometimes there's deadbeat mothers too, but we'll do the same thing. In the case of the dad carrying the child, more than likely whoever he says is the mother is going to be the mother and it's very easy to determine that. And we do do paternity testing right in our own office. The two paternity people do buckle swab which is taking a cotton swab basically and putting it on each side of the cheeks and swabbing that and you do that for each of the alleged fathers and the mother and the child and then you send it all into our agent that takes care of the processing for us, the lab that does that work for us. And in about two weeks or so we get the answers back and our paternity is established if it's 99% or more. I anticipate your staff have to have excellent people skills because I imagine they're getting some difficult phone calls from time to time or they're following up with people that aren't real glad to hear from your staff. Talk about that a little bit. That's true, I'm gonna say I have an excellent staff. They are all hard workers and at times they do get stressed out and they might seem our sound cross over the phone but it's, we're hoping that everybody remembers your one case out of 550 let's say and it kinda depends what happened just before or what else they're working on that day and that's why when you call my agency and you talk to it, the person that answers the phone is very well versed in all our services and all our programs and all the information because they can call your case up on the screen right in front of them and get all the information that has happened during the last I believe six years of information is out on the computer. So if they give you an answer to a question, oftentimes it's not necessary to talk specifically to the case worker because what they're telling you is the most current information and they have it right at their fingertips so it's correct information and they really don't need to and I don't wanna use the word bother but there's no real need to talk to the case worker because their work is supposed to be to make sure that the order is established to make sure it's being followed by the non-custodial parent to make sure that it's the right rates and everything and so their job is to follow up on that and make sure that it's treating everybody equitable. Let's go back to you mentioned the trust fund. Now, what if someone isn't receiving their check? What happens? Please don't call my agency. Ever since the trust fund took over the child support collection and disbursement of payments, they are the main contact for financial information regarding your case. If you miss a check or if your check is short or if for some reason you receive an extra check, if you have a question as to why that's happening, they are the ones that you're supposed to start with because they have all the information there, they know when the check was received, what days it was from as far as the employer goes because most of our checks are sent to the trust fund through the use of income withholding orders that are sent to the employer. And you said they, I mean if I'm a constituent of Sheboygan County and I didn't receive a check, I would think it'd be a natural to look in the phone book and say I'm gonna call the child support agency and find out what's happening with this check. And you're saying that's a call not well placed. They should be contacting who? Well, they should be contacting the Wisconsin Collection Trust Fund. And their number is 1-800-991-5530. And they asked to speak to a financial assistant and they will be given a series of information. I believe you have to answer your social security number or your case number or your court case number, whatever you happen to know in order to get the information and the trust funds. A recording system will give you enough information so that if you have to go to a live person you can also do that. But if they call your department and get into the phone system, that number is provided whether they're asking about check or information. That is one of the, we have an answering service through the county that we utilize and it's, we change the information regularly so there's a lot of people that insist upon getting that number, getting an answer and pressing zero and that doesn't work with our system because zero is not a number, it's just gonna bring you back around into the same voicemail message that we have. What you need to do is listen and if it's a financial question, I wanna say off the bat, I believe you press one and that'll give you the information about the trust fund including the phone number and allow you to answer them. Now going back to the facilitation, the follow through to make sure the check is forwarded on. You have staff who from time to time are dealing with individuals, I imagine who aren't real excited about following through and sending out that check. If they don't, what's your recourse? Whether several steps that need to be taken, once in a while it only takes a call from someone from the agency or the attorney or one of the financial people will call and say we didn't receive your check is there a reason for that and sometimes it's the non-custodial parent forgot to to let us know that they were laid off or lost their job for one reason or another and then there's certain things that they have to do according to the court order. So you go back to the court order and you look on if for instance they're required to do work searches or if they're required to do a number of different things, sometimes the court orders are very creative and they give them different options that they can do. We follow up then if they say well we're laid off what we do is find out if they're going to be receiving unemployment compensation and we can issue an income withholding order for unemployment and collect things that way. If they're retired we can use some retirement benefits or out of retirement fund that they might have we can attach to that. Now just recently we're able to put administrative liens and license suspensions and that's another one that I can't remember off hand on our against people's states so the other one is we can freeze bank accounts. So you have a number of tools available so you do. Now if that individual leaves the state does that change the rules of the game any? It does and it doesn't. If it depends where the rest of the family is if it's here in Wisconsin then we can still process the case because we have what's called jurisdiction as long as the child and the custodial parent live here in Wisconsin will have jurisdiction. Now it might move from Sheboygan County to let's say Marathon County or St. Croix County or someplace else depending on where she moves but as long as she's in the state I shouldn't say she as long as they are in the state we have jurisdiction and then it depends where they move to there are some states that are notorious for being very very difficult to work with and getting information from one of those is a neighbor right to the South Illinois. California is another good example and Texas and Wyoming I believe is another one because they're just so huge that you lose a lot of information and for instance we send something down to California and ask them to enforce our order. We go through the state and through the local agencies and we ask them to enforce it. It's just to get an answer from them could add as much as three to six months to the timeframe that we're working with. And meanwhile you have a parent and a child or children waiting for that much needed financial support. Is there any time limit to court orders? As far as they're in enforce until the child turns it's either 18 or 19 as of right now and a graduate of a high school. Or after I believe it's July 1st it's gonna be a change that's gonna automatically change everything to 18. And then after that time, once they are a graduate and are 18 then child support itself is no longer an issue. But if there's any arrearages or past due child support payments that were missed we can collect on those for up to 20 years of the child's 18th birthday. You can hardly escape the press for more than a day on all the discussion at the state level with the budget deficit and what it may mean for local governments and what it may mean for people statewide in regards to providing services. What types of implications or concerns do you have with what's happening at the state level? How could that impede your ability to provide service? Originally when the budget repair bill was brought out the governor had said something about that. Child support agencies should not be affected but I don't think that is any longer the case and I hear in Sheboygan County we're part of county government and therefore we're going to be part of the solution and we're gonna work as much as we need to to see that our budget is going to be met. But if something does happen that we're in the loose funding we had several staff meetings. We had meetings with management and we came up with several suggestions as to what may be required. The worst case scenario is right now with the county's hiring freeze. We have an LTE that we'd be lost without. We've had an LTE position for about approximately the last eight years and they do a lot of the initial work on cases and information systems and so forth. Everything is supposed to be automated into the state's automated collection system which is called kids which stands for kids information data system and this person has been working on and off for the last eight years doing this type of work trying to work the process through until it becomes automated so that it's more user friendly and is part of the system. Well, there's always new incentives coming up each year, new programs and so forth so she's been working an awful long time and if I'm not allowed to hire that person back I'm gonna have to redistribute what that person does for anywhere from 25 to 30 hours a week and some of those things that we may have to do would be to instead of having windows service at 7.30 in the morning maybe for a start at 10 o'clock in the morning and then instead of we jobs share one of my staff with the corporation council's office to take care of 50 once in 55 work that the assistant corporation council needs to do and we may have to pull some of that time back. So in short, if we lose some of the shared revenue that's being suggested it's going to have implications and as you said it's gonna have implications countywide and we're all working to be part of the solution and looking at how we can do the same work at less cost and I appreciate you and your staff's efforts. Well, it's been good to have you with us today Jim and kudos to you and your staff because I know you have a very challenging role and perhaps one of the more important in Sheboygan County because it directly affects children and making sure that children are getting their financial resources, financial resources they need. So thank you for joining me today. Thank you for having me. My pleasure. My pleasure. I just want to say one more thing. We may not be the biggest department but I believe we're one of the hardest working departments in the county and regardless of what at times people may think that we're doing a rotten job we are really doing the best we can and we truly do work hard. And if people want more information what number can they call very quickly? They can call 459-4301. I believe it is. 459-4301. That doesn't sound right. Let me look. I got that written down because I knew there was going to be numbers. If they just want to find out more information they can call 459-3041. 3041 and we've got to finish the program. Thank you for joining us next week or next month rather it'll be a discussion of another important department, our finance department. We're in the process of kicking off the budget process and Tim Finch is going to join us and we're going to talk about our overall budget, $130 million budget, 23 departments and we'll share with viewers where we're at and what our goal and objectives are. So on behalf of Dan Lemminghue County Board Chairman and the County Board thanks for joining us today.