"Tracking down dollars: Parents are turning to private companies in the often frustrating search for child support payments"

Brenda Miller remembers the day the telephone call came.

For more than seven years, she had struggled to raise her two boys and pleaded, unsuccessfully, with her ex-husband to make this child support payments. Her case had fallen through the cracks of an overburdened state agency.

But last May, Ms. Miller decided she would try one more time to collect at least a portion of the nearly $14,000 owed her in back payments. She called a private collection agency that claimed it could get her payments, filled out an application and thought that would be the end of her venture.

"About a month later, the telephone rang and it was an investigator," says Ms. Miller, 41, a nursing instructor. "He said, 'We've collected.
'I said, 'What?' And then I'm screaming, saying, 'That's great!' "

The company, called Child Support Enforcement*, is part of a growing industry to augment the child support program of the Texas attorney general's office and other similar agencies nationwide that are overwhelmed by staggering caseloads.

But while Ms. Miller has been able to survive, life hasn't been easy. Since the divorce, Ms. Miller says, there have been times when she scrimped on what she ate so she could feed her boys, and there wasn't enough money sometimes for school clothes, supplies and extra electricity for heat. "Our standard of living went down the tubes," she says. "When the car broke down, I couldn't afford to fix it, so we did without it. The kids ate cornmeal mush sometimes, and we had to heat the house with kerosene."

"I know the impression -- some men think women are out getting their teeth capped and hair bleached every day with the child support. Not on $150 a month. That ain't spit. Most women are too busy trying to put food on the table or pay the light bill or something like that," she says. The $150 a month is what her ex-husband was ordered to pay.

* CSE Child Support Enforcement now offers its services to families as Supportkids.

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