Delinquent in child support lands parents on ‘Most Wanted’ list

A “most wanted” website features dozens of men and women, many of them smiling for the camera and all of them behind in their child support payments. They might not be as dangerous as the FBI’s 10 most wanted, but they can be just as difficult to track down.

A security guard from Seattle owes $20,000. A construction worker from Spokane owes $43,000. A woman employed in the adult entertainment industry in Las Vegas is $14,000 in arrears. When non-custodial parents don’t pay, their names and faces can go up on the website run by the state Division of Child Support.

“If you’ve made it to the most wanted website, you can say that you pretty much ignored all of our attempts to contact you, to respond to our letters, to find you, to get you to call us back, to meet payment agreements,” said spokesman Adolfo Capestany. “It’s really a measure of last resort.”

The state collects $700 million a year in child support payments and the most wanted list generates just a fraction of that. But the list can be an outlet for frustrated parents, who must provide the photo and the information for the website postings.

“They’ve tried everything else and their hope is that by putting the name and the last whereabouts and the photo that it causes somebody to either give us a tip to where we can find them, it may cause an acquaintance of that person or a family member, perhaps the shame factor.”

Of course, it’s the kids who suffer when parents don’t pay child support.

“They don’t have school supplies, they don’t have clothes that help them fit in with other kids, especially at middle school – and it affects their self esteem, which affects their ability to make friends, affects their performance in school,” said Paige Tangney, a Seattle school psychologist for 30 years.

Tangney specializes in parental loss issues and said confused kids will often blame themselves as they try to understand why a parent is absent.

“I had a little girl one time, 5 years old, her mother abandoned the family and she started drawing pictures of herself with no face,” said Tangney. “And she told me that she was trying to be really good and she was putting pretty pictures on her mother’s dresser every night so that her mother would come home but it wasn’t working.”

Recent figures show between 62-65 percent of payments in Washington are current, which is among the top ten in the nation. The state has 350,000 child support cases and about 700 Support Enforcement Officers.

You have to go six months without making a payment and be $5,000 behind in child support to qualify for the state’s most wanted website. Some of the delinquent accounts are staggering. A systems analyst with a last known address in Lakewood owes almost $260,000. A man from Carson, Washington owes $159,000. One of the largest delinquent accounts belongs to a woman who owes $167,000. It will be tough to collect from her in her last known address, in Tanzania.