Province closing in on deadbeat parents

Change taking too long: auditor general The province is still a year away from being able to offer quicker service to those trying to extract money from deadbeat parents, a Justice Department official said Thursday. "We're building a new system. They're anticipating it's going to be up in a year," said Dave Brickwood, assistant deputy minister with the Crowns division. There are about 15,500 active maintenance-enforcement accounts in Manitoba, with roughly 20 to 25 per cent of them having some sort of issue to resolve, he said. "Right now everything is manually entered into the system, and a lot of it is still paper- based," Brickwood said, meaning delays in getting disputes settled and orders enforced. The province is installing a new information system, based on one used in Alberta, but there have been computer compatibility issues -- not to mention the fact that Manitoba's laws are different from Alberta's. On Thursday, the province's auditor general, Carol Bellringer, criticized the Justice Department for taking so long to implement recommendations that would improve enforcement of court orders related to child support. The auditor general's office first raised the issue in late 1997. "Although the department has made some progress, given that these recommendations were issued 11 years ago, we would have expected them all to have been resolved by now," Bellringer said in a report. Thursday's document summarized the status of 627 recommendations from 33 previous reports issued from 1997 to 2005. "We are pleased that the majority (79 per cent) of our recommendations have been resolved," Bellringer wrote in an overview. "While we understand that certain recommendations require a longer period of time for complete resolution and that resource constraints and other priorities can delay implementation, there are 66 outstanding recommendations in 15 reports that are over five years old," she added. Bellringer said the province has yet to fully implement 27 of 41 recommendations from a 2005 report on the protection of well-water quality. Among them was that the Water Stewardship Department, in consultation with the chief medical officer of health, develop a protocol for informing private well owners of bacterial, nitrate, metal and chemical contamination. larry.kusch@freepress.mb.ca