BALTIMORE — A new legislative audit shows Maryland's Department of Human Services failed to collect $1.4 billion in unpaid child support.
The outstanding balance accounts for the period of October 1, 2022 through September 30, 2023.
That's drastically higher than the $457.8 million in payments received during that same time frame.
Auditors counted 162,000 open child support cases in that span.
While the number of non-payments remained unchanged from 2020 to 2023, collections gradually decreased by 21 percent.
The audit suggests the Child Support Administration (CSA) struggled to hold non-payers accountable.
"Our audit disclosed that CSA did not have sufficient procedures to ensure that the Motor Vehicle Administration (MVA) suspended driver’s licenses of non- custodial parents (NCPs) who were delinquent in their child support payments," the audit states.
This apparently happened because CSA doesn't require case workers to document driver’s license numbers of non-custodial parents.
"Per MVA records, between September 2023 and February 2024, CSA submitted 13,636 unique NCPs for suspension of which 5,070 (37 percent) were rejected by the MVA," auditors wrote in their report. "Our analysis of the 5,070 rejected referrals disclosed that 865 (or 17 percent) were caused solely by a driver’s license number mismatch or omission."
For their part, CSA disagreed with how auditors summed up the MVA process.
"CSA would send a list of offenders to suspend. If the automated matching system was unable to locate an exact match in the MVA system, the system was programmed to return to CSA information on the 10 closest matches including Providing Personally Identifiable Information (PII)," CSA wrote in response. "Providing PII to a third party for customers who have nothing to do with a particular transaction presents a potential privacy exposure that MVA does not view as an acceptable risk. As such, MVA has decided to discontinue the match program."
As of June 30, 2023, CSA reported an 11.5 percent staffing shortage, equating to about seven vacancies out of 61 positions.
The full audit can be viewed below.
