Camacho accuses Moylan of mismanaging child support systems
The race for Guam attorney general moves along with fireworks as candidate Leevin Camacho accuses his opponent, former attorney general Douglas Moylan, of mismanaging the child support system when he was in office.
Camacho said $5 million in child support funds are currently sitting idly in a government account and not reaching their intended recipients, a situation which he suggested was inherited by the Office of the Attorney General from Moylan’s tenure.
“When Attorney Moylan took over the AG’s office in 2003, there were $5.5 million in undistributed child support funds,” Camacho said.
Citing a report by the Office of Public Accountability, Camacho said the idle funds went up to $6.5 million from 2003 through 2005 “due to a lack of monitoring, non-maintenance of the child support system and software, and a passive approach to addressing personnel needs.” “What happened? Attorney Moylan had his chance to address the issue but didn’t,” Camacho said.
In response, Moylan dismissed Camacho’s claims as “factually wrong and misleading,” explaining that the poor distribution of child support funds was a problem that existed long before he was elected into office.
“Leevin released a single audit that failed to accurately describe my role in fixing an already flawed CS collections system,” the former attorney general said.
Moylan said after uncovering the discrepancies between the Child Support Enforcement Division’s and Department of Administration’s accounts, his staff “started the reconciliation and created an effective ‘reaction plan’ to begin the process of fixing the unaccounted-for child support funds.”
The funds in question, Moylan said, had been in DOA’s account since the 1990s when the child support program was within the purview of the administration.
“We developed and started the electronic funds transfer program for child support monies to get payments immediately and directly to custodial parents through the ‘Kids First Card’ (KFC) using the debit card format; the (electronic fund transfer) was bid out and Bank of Guam awarded the contract for this EFT system.”
The card was designed to stop the government from holding onto the child support monies and reduce the undistributed child support fund problem by putting deposits directly into the KFC.
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“Candidate Camacho disingenuously states that undistributed child support collections increased $1 million during my tenure,” Moylan said.
“The problem was one of reconciliation of the amounts of UDF appearing on the AG’s CSED's in-house APASI computer system, and the amounts of UDF appearing on the DOA’s AS-400 computer system.”
Based on the result of the Aug. 25 primary, Moylan acknowledged he is facing an uphill battle with his apparently more popular opponent, who clinched nearly 50 percent of the votes in the primary.
Moylan is banking on the support of Frank Gary Gumataotao, who endorsed the candidacy of the former attorney general after being eliminated from the primary round.
If elected into office, Camacho vows to “expend every effort to identify the rightful owners of these funds, and explore ways that technology can be used to find the parents and children to whom that money was supposed to go. I will work aggressively to right this wrong.” If elected into office, Camacho vows to “expend every effort to identify the rightful owners of these funds, and explore ways that technology can be used to find the parents and children to whom that money was supposed to go. I will work aggressively to right this wrong.”
Moylan, however, said Camacho “provides no substantive solutions on how he expects to fix this problem which has persisted in the three attorney generals who followed my first term.”