Wednesday, Oct. 20, 1999 | 11:34 a.m.
The government computer that distributes local monthly child support payments has been plagued by glitches, resulting in hundreds of custodial parents receiving checks several weeks late since January, officials said.
However, the Clark County District Attorney's Child Support Division says it is fixing the problem and has reduced the number from a peak of 1,500 late checks in August to a few hundred this month.
"We understand that the parents and children need those checks, and we are working hard to correct the situation," Lee Wastell, assistant director of the District Attorney's Child Support Division, said Tuesday. "Our staff is on top of it."
The District Attorney's Child Support Division computer is part of the federal-state-county-linked NOMADS system that also monitors the Nevada welfare system and already has cost the state more than $100 million because of unexpected problems and delays.
The glitches in payments occur, Wastell said, when noncustodial parents send the wrong amounts of child support -- either too much or not enough -- and the computer spits the payment into a pool that requires workers to manually input the data.
"The check can go into the pool even if the difference is as little as a penny," Wastell said, noting that not all of those checks wind up being late. "The computer tells us the amount is not accurate and that it does not know what to do with the check."
Another problem occurred last month because the DA's computer was programmed to accept just two payments per month. However, because September was a rare three-paycheck month for many companies that pay every two weeks, the computer rejected those wage garnishment checks, which then had to be inputted manually.
"We fixed that problem by rewriting a code," Wastell said.
Those incidents are the latest in what is becoming a growing series of problems with new government computers statewide that were installed to address the Y2K problems.
Besides NOMADS, the most costly of the troubled computers, significant glitches have surfaced in the $20 million Family Court Services Family Tracs computer since it was installed in April 1998. Problems included juvenile delinquency and child abuse data not converting properly from the old system and a duplication of numbers issued for the same cases.
The problems with the Department of Motor Vehicle's $35 million Genesis computer became widely publicized when Las Vegans were forced to endure extremely long waits for licenses and registrations and because of a backlog of mail-in registration renewals at the DMV's Carson City office in recent months. Those waits have gotten shorter but are still about two hours.
Wastell said 20,688 child support checks were distributed in August and 17,242 checks went out last month from his office. The number of checks vary, he said, depending on payment schedules for noncustodial parents.
To speed the solution, Wastell said, 20 caseworkers early this year were taken off their regular assignments to help convert the agency's 40,000 cases from the old computer system to NOMADS. To date, he said, they are 35 percent done and expect to complete the job by next August.
Until then, those employees' cases are spread out among other workers, he said.
Because of the high volume of phone calls his department receives on a range of issues, it may be necessary for people who have not received their support checks to try several times to get through, Wastell said.
He said his office is required to give noncustodial parents 10 days past the due date to send in support checks and must give companies that garnish employee wages 30 days before approaching them. The DA's office deposits the checks it receives and issues its own checks to recipients.
Wastell said not every situation with late checks is the fault of the computer.
"I looked into one incident this morning and found that the reason one woman's child support check was late from North Carolina was because that state went to a centralized system, which Nevada will do once NOMADS is ready," Wastell said.
"I would suspect that we also will have some problems when that happens. However, the centralized location in Nevada will be Las Vegas."
No date has been set for the state's NOMADS system to take over distribution of child support checks from Nevada's counties.
Also, Wastell said, a problem he handled this week involved one of his workers simply punching in the wrong case number, crediting the money to the wrong client.
"I called the woman today and asked her if she wanted us to hold the check for her to pick up or mail it to her, and she told us to mail it," Wastell said. "One of our staff walked the check to a mailbox so it would get to her as soon as possible.
"Our policy is to try to get all child support checks out 48 hours after the funds arrive. We do not send the checks out on a set day each month. Child support checks are going out all of the time around here."
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