Hamilton County sent some early warnings last week that Ohio may have another child support fiasco on its hands. Unfortunately the state seems to be putting those hands firmly over its ears.

The warning signs are there. Spot checks have found accounting mistakes. Lower level personnel have tried to alert superiors. But the top people don't want to hear any bad news.

"You're talking about a handful of cases in one county. There is no reason to assume that means we have a systemic problem in the state," said Jon Allen, spokesman for the Ohio Department of Job and Family Services. That would sound reasonable if the state didn't have such an absolutely miserable record when it comes to cheating children out child support they are owed. Two years ago the state acknowledged it had improperly withheld $15 million in support money from the people who were supposed to get it under a federally mandated distribution system. Even after the state learned it was improperly withholding money, it continued to do so for a couple more years. Once it acknowledged the scope of that little accounting glitch, it took Ohio more than 18 months to distribute the money to the families it owed.

Now the Association for Children for Enforcement of Support (ACES) thinks Ohio counties may have improperly withheld child support funds from thousands of children between 1986 and 1997, whose custodial parents were on welfare. That covers a period of time before the federally mandated collection system went into effect. If mistakes were made then, individual counties that collected the payments made them, but the funds were sent to Columbus, so it would be up to the state to repay any money that was improperly withheld.

Hamilton County's Department of Job and Family Services thinks that there is at least a chance that ACES may be right. That's why the department has suggested auditing 18,000 of 88,000 cases from that time period.

"We want to ensure people receive their child support," Suzanne Burke, director of the county department, told the Enquirer last week. On Monday she is scheduled to meet with the county commissioners to decide whether to do the audits, or to send letters to the affected families and invite them to request audits of their cases. Either way, it could add up to a lot of time and expense for the county. But in the long run it's worth it. People have a right to know their government doesn't cheat them out of money, even by accident.

Hamilton County is considering this extraordinary action because in a spot check of 10 cases done a few weeks ago, as many of seven may have included underpayments to the clients.

Court-ordered support payments are administered through the counties. Prior to 1986, payments were used to reimburse counties for welfare payments to the custodial payments. That was changed because lawmakers realized that support payments are supposed to be for the benefit of children and children need that money for current expenses more than the counties needed it as payback for past services. The problem, according to ACES, is that sometimes money got withheld for reimbursement anyway. If such problems occurred in a big county like Hamilton, ACES figures the chances are that similar errors were made everywhere.

Maybe, but the state has no intention of doing anything on its own to find out. The state will conduct an audit for any person with a child support case who requests it, according to Allen. That's the catch. You have to request it. If you are a single mother barely getting by, who depends on your ex's support payments to make sure your kids are fed and clothed, you have to go to the state and ask it to check and see if it cheated you. The state, despite its history of poor accounting, won't check its books unless forced to do so. And it's betting on that fact that most people on child support will be too busy, too tired or too intimidated to do so.

There are 985,000 active child support cases in the state, Allen said. If you go back to 1986, that number climbs into the millions. Why should the state go looking for a problem that could be that big? Because, it might just be there.

Contact David Wells at 768-8310; fax: 768-8610; e-mail: dwells@enquirer.com. Cincinnati.Com keyword: Wells.