Thursday, December 17, 2009
SOUTH CAROLINA STATE BUDGET CRISIS DEEPENS--KATHLEEN HAYES STILL DOES NOT "GET IT"
According to the article "State budget crisis deepens":
Kathleen Hayes, director of the Department of Social Services, said the latest budget cut comes after the agency has cut services to families and children, required its workers to take unpaid time off, laid off others, eliminated vacant positions and kept a freeze on hiring.
The 5 percent reduction means the agency might not be able to meet its ongoing obligations, Hayes said. At the Social Services Department, a 5 percent cut equals $6.25 million. The agency is down $48 million since July 2008.
Those cuts, in turn, affected the agency's ability to secure matching federal funds. And in September, Hayes said the agency was notified that it would lose $16 million for welfare services.
Meanwhile, the need for welfare services is up 46 percent since 2007. The number of families who have qualified for food stamps increased by 31 percent in the last two years.
"Families in South Carolina are hurting," Hayes said in a statement. "We are seeing people who have never sought the services of DSS before."
Dr. Hayes has been on the job for two years now and she apparently still does not understand that tens of thousands of custodial parents are hurting because the South Carolina Department of Social Services' failure to install a federally-mandated state-wide computerized child support tracking and collection system has resulted in a situation whereby the South Carolina Family Courts cannot locate tens of thousands of non-custodial parents and enforce their child support obligations.
This failure on the part of this agency has also resulted in the imposition of TENS of MILLIONS of fines by the Federal Government against the State of South Carolina. This situation has now existed for over twelve years. Every other State in the Country has managed to install a state-wide computerized child support tracking and collection system and, as a result, some of them are seeing their child support arrearages begin to decrease rather than increase. So the time has come for Dr. Hayes to either solve the problem or step down and let someone who knows what they are doing take over. This has essentially been our position for eight (8) months and we have seen nothing to to change our opinion.
Labels: Child Support Collection, Computerized Child Support System, Federal Fines, Institutional Mismanagement
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The local clerks want to control the money. Im plementation of a statewide system would give the state control.
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# posted by 
: 5:05 AM
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