An Ohio computer system supposed to make it easier to track deadbeat parents who do not pay child support is turning out to be a deadbeat to many.

        Thousands of parents in Hamilton County — and even more across the state — are not receiving their child support checks on time because of computer problems at the Ohio Department of Human Services, which is supposed to collect and distribute those payments statewide.

        In many cases, child support checks are arriving more than six weeks late.

        Mindy Good, a spokeswoman for the Hamilton County Department of Human Services, said her office has received about 5,000 complaints a week on the issue for the past six weeks. And the county is not in a position to do anything about it, she said.

        Ms. Good said her department has assigned 15 caseworkers to handle complaints. Before the county changed to the state-administered system, five caseworkers were able to do the job.

        “All we do is act as a go-between,” Ms. Good said. “We have people calling and literally screaming at us because their payment is stuck somewhere in the system. Then they're doubly outraged when we can't help them.”

        Don Thomas, director of the Hamilton County Deparment of Human Services, said the state took away the county's authority to administer child support but left the responsibility.

        In the past, “If a check was sent to the wrong person, we would cut them a new check immediately and work it out later,” Mr. Thomas said. “The state isn't willing to do that.”

        The state took over child support processing from Hamilton County in October, when the county put most of its cases into a new statewide computer system called Support Enforcement Tracking System (SETS). Each state in the country is required by the federal government to move to a centralized system as part of welfare reform.

        The idea is that a centralized system will make it easier to find an Ohio parent who owes child support if they are working on a construction job in, say, Florida.

        But the system isn't working properly. State DHS officials initially balmed individual counties for not knowing the computer system well enough. Now, they say, the problem is with the system itself.

        There are some situations where the state is late in processing the payments, or state computers do not have enough information to properly cut and mail the check to the parent.

        “It is not the department's intention to embarrass, or lay unnecessary blame, at the doors of the county agencies,” Jacqui Romer Sensky, director of the Ohio Department of Job and Family Services, said in a recent e-mail to counties. “We accept responsibility for the issues within our control that affect your ability to serve families. We are committed to correcting those issues.”

        At the same time, the state is working with Bank One, adminis trator of Child Support Payment Central, to correct issues for which the bank has responsibility, Ms. Romer Sensky said. The bank has a $125 million, five-year contract with the state to handle child support payments.

        Diana Redman, a state official managing the system, said Tuesday that she and Bank One officials have had “very candid conversations” about the problems.

        For the week ending Dec. 4, the system logged 6,800 payments it could not process because of incorrect or incomplete information, Ms. Redman said. The same week, the state processed 239,231 payments without a problem.

        In the past, counties often knew enough about their own child-support cases to provide information left off forms in order to process payments. Now, the centralized system needs all that information before the check is cut. The sheer size of the new system is causing backlogs.

        And when a check is not mailed on time, an automatic letter is sent to the noncustodial parent saying the parent is late.

        “These people are angry because they're not getting their checks on time, or they've paid and they get a letter saying they haven't paid,” Ms. Good said.

        There are 78,000 child support cases in Hamilton County, but Ms. Good said about one in five county residents is touched by the system — either paying or receiving child support.

        The state has 850,000 child support payment cases and collected $1.7 billion last year, said ODHS spokesman John Allen.

        “This is a big program, and it's undergone dramatic change in the last two months, and we are working to address the concerns that the counties have,” he said.

       The Associated Press contributed to this report.

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