COLUMBUS — Legislation that would let Ohio return $38 million in illegally withheld back payments and income tax refunds to child support recipients also would require the state to pay interest on refunds of more than $10.

        “This is significant to ensure that families — especially the children — receive what they are entitled,” Sen. Bill Harris, an Ashland Republican who sponsored the bill, said Wednesday while testifying before the Senate Finance Committee.

        The bill puts into effect Gov. Bob Taft's executive order requiring counties to audit up to 160,000 child support cases, determine whether money is owed and reimburse families the amounts plus interest.

        The state acknowledged in February that it did not reprogram the child support computer system, which calculates and distributes payments, in accordance with a 1996 federal welfare reform law. As a result, the state wrongly withheld millions in overdue child support payments and income tax refunds over three years from former welfare recipients.

        China Widener, deputy director for the Ohio Department of Job and Family Services' Office of Child Support, told lawmakers that the state will pay back money it withheld between Oct. 1, 1997, and Sept. 30, 2000.

        It will cost $18 million for counties to audit all of the cases.

        The state will pay back a total of $38 million in withheld funds — $21 million in back child support payments and $17 million in state income tax refunds that were illegally intercepted.

        And, the interest, which was set at 6.5 percent based on last month's prime rate, is expected to cost the state about $6 million.

        Of all that, the state has asked the federal government to pay $22 million, Ms. Widener said.

        The entire process is expected to take about 18 months.

        Sen. James Carnes, a St. Clairsville Republican and the committee's chairman, asked Tom Hayes, the department's director, whether the problem has been fixed.

        “Yes. We believe we have confronted this issue and the purpose now is to confront the money owed to families and children. We need this to do that,” Hayes said of the legislation.

        The Association for Children for the Enforcement of Support, a Toledo-based national advocacy group that has sued the state, will ask lawmakers next week to include in the bill a deadline by which all the money must be paid back, said Geraldine Jensen, the group's president.

        “It could take them 20 years to repay this. We think one year is more than adequate,” she said.

        Jensen said the group also wants a clause included in the legislation that would “hold families harmless from the mistakes that the state made.”

        The clause, for example, would exempt families from paying back the state should audits reveal the state overpaid them at any point, she said.

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