[FormerACLUmember]

Welfare reform laws require mothers to name a father in order to get benefits. State bureaucracies then hound whomever the woman names for child support. The problem is that there's little incentive for the agencies to get paternity right.

[Fichori]

Someone needs to finger Zero.

[YCTHouston]

Amazing story of bureaucratic lunacy. Also makes you wonder if the actual parents allowed this fraud to go on because the free checks were too hard to pass up.

[familyop]

"The problem is that there's little incentive for the agencies to get paternity right."

Try to get it right, and their will eventually be a whole lot of VIP DNA prints stored.

[freekitty]

This sounds like a scam to me. The Department or some of it’s employees are probably involved. Don’t know the judge would rule the way he did unless he is just plain nuts.

[Myrddin]

It gets worse. California gives the child support agencies full access to driver's license records. The people doing the investigations aren't the sharpest tools in the shed. I received a child support certified letter in 2002. The LA child support "staff" had used the driver's license records to compose a fictitious "person" with my name and driver's license number, residence records from some other person and heaven knows what else. They called the HR department at my employer to try to get their hands on my income. It took weeks of phone calls and faxes to prove I wasn't the "daddy". It helped that the "daddy" was black and I'm white. My "ace in the hole" was having had cancer in 1985, I was incapable of being the "bio dad" to either of the "offspring". I had never been in the city where the "offspring" live either. What an expensive and annoying mess. It didn't help that I had just received a layoff notice the very same day. When it rains, it pours.

[Myrddin]

The real kicker was that the "agency" people used only the first and last name when doing the research. Had they included a middle name, I would never have been bothered. Totally incompetent. A first and last name in my case might yield thousands of hits in California alone. It makes me wonder if they had access to income information, thus were searching for a high income person that was too busy to pay attention to the scam they were attempting. Perhaps being laid off the same day was a blessing.

[verklaring]

These are the same people who will soon be running your health care, your business and your retirement accounts.

[Quix]

Maybe some bureaucrats need his reimbursement taken out of their 401K’s.

[DH]

AMAZING! All that it took was a government gestapo troop to take him to make a face-to-face ID with the mother, and if she was deceased, the girl. They would have found that the girl actually lived with her real father. Case closed!

[dangerdoc]

Never, ever, ignore official mail.

He could have responded in crayon and the court would have ordered paternity testing and he would be off the hook.

Making the biologic father pay for their children is not wrong. Getting the mother to name the father in order to get them off tax payer money is the moral and ethical thing to do.

Ignoring a court letter naming you a father is a bad mistake. These things happen, I was named in a paternity suit when I was 19 by a total stranger. All I had to do was deny it, it didn’t even procede to blood testing.

[jwparkerjr]

IIRC, there was a case in the last year or so where the man proved he was not the father but the court ruled he had to continue to pay support because the mother and child had become accustomed to it and there was no one else to pay! What a crock!

We’ve reached the point that the law is as big a threat to the average citizen as the criminals. I had some contact with the criminal justice system last year on behalf of my grandson. He was absolutely guilty, but the system was chock full of errors. I realized that had he been innocent I would have been powerless to help him prove it.

I’ve been saying for years that future historians will look back at America and wonder how they managed to systematically undo everything that made it the greatest country in the history of Earth. One by one they were overturned by a court, voted out or just simply disappeared. I fear the next four years will be remembered for our country falling apart.

[hunter112]

You can never, ever, ever just ignore something from this particular type of government office. The women who staff this particular American Gestapo absolutely HATE men. The very best thing to do might be to find a woman to talk to them on your behalf.

While I was a title officer, and had to do some research on child support liens that required a call to their offices, I'd always have a female co-worker make the call, those b!tches would not give me the time of day, even though I was engaged in an activity that might lead to them getting money from some poor guy they were in pursuit of.