Honorable Robert Bunda

President of the Senate

Twenty-First State Legislature

Regular Session of 2001

State of Hawaii

Sir:

Your Committee on Ways and Means, to which was referred S.B. No. 131 entitled:

begs leave to report as follows:

The purpose of this measure is to make an appropriation to the Child Support Enforcement Agency to hire additional caseworker staff and a supervisor.

Your Committee finds that the caseload per caseworker is five hundred cases per worker, which far exceeds the national average of one caseworker per three hundred fifty cases. The agency is responsible for processing child support payments, so if processing is delayed, payments are delayed, which is a hardship to the children whose custodial parents rely on these support payments. Your Committee finds that child support payments are crucial to a child's well-being.

Members of your Committee expressed concern that payments should be the responsibility of parents and therefore a surcharge of ten per cent should be assessed. However, your Committee is not in favor of any arrangement that would take away money that should be going to the child.

Your Committee believes that the agency is performing a valuable function, as, if the agency did not act as a conduit to enforce the transition of child support money from non-custodial to custodial parents, the custodial parents would be forced to sue for nonpayment through the court system. This would clog up the court system and require the custodial parent to use resources -– including support money that is supposed to be spent on the child –- trying to enforce the support order. This would be a return to the frustrating and inequitable past in which a richer noncustodial parent could manipulate the system to avoid child support obligations. Hawaii's children deserve a more effective system than that.

As affirmed by the record of votes of the members of your Committee on Ways and Means that is attached to this report, your Committee is in accord with the intent and purpose of S.B. No. 131, as amended herein, and recommends that it pass Third Reading in the form attached hereto as S.B. No. 131, S.D. 1.