Twenty years ago, agencies collected four dollars for every dollar spent on child support. Today, despite the billions of dollars spent on more advanced computer systems and several waves of legislation making it easier to collect, there has been no improvement. For every dollar we spend, we still collect four dollars. In desperation, some states are turning to private companies to deal with this problem. Policy Studies, Inc. runs child support programs under contract in six states.
Private companies obey all the same rules and regulations as state agencies.
They do not run the entire state program, but in certain cities, counties or judicial districts, the program has been essentially transferred to a private company. Comparatively, private companies spend about 35 percent less to run these programs than do publicly-run organizations. They saw privatized child support enforcement as potentially promising but wanted to be sure that private agencies and companies were not achieving results by creaming. The GAO looked at private contracts in Virginia, Arizona and Tennessee. They selected a publicly-run control office and a private office dealing with the same demographics, same per capita income in the communities, same racial makeup, and roughly the same caseload to worker ratios.