One of the selling points of contracting out is that it's supposedly more efficient to have private sector workers do the job than public employees. Well, don't try to sell that bogus bag of goods to veteran Caseworker Neal Frumkin, who has devoted his career to tracking down parents who fail to pay child support. That's just not how he sees it.

"Contracting out is ideologically driven by a conservative bias against the public sector," said Mr. Frumkin, a member of Social Service Employees Union Local 371 who works at the Office of Child Support Enforcement in the Administration for Children's Services.

Over the past 25 years, he has seen the staff erode steadily as the agency hands out more and more work to private companies with multi-million dollar contracts. In Brooklyn, where Mr. Frumkin works, the downsizing has slashed the staff from about 350 to 80 and shuttered one of two offices, he said.

"These managers want to show that they are changing the way things are done," said Mr. Frumkin, providing his take on the rationale behind contracting out. "If you think that city workers are incompetent and lazy and you want to show that you are innovative, you will pursue contracting out," Mr. Frumkin said.

"As the city seeks solutions to the budget problem, it doesn't make sense to scapegoat our members, who have an average salary of $29,000. We want to keep our jobs and do good work for the city." — Edward W. Hysyk DC 37 Secretary

The goal of OCSE is to track down parents who don't support their children. The office pays contractors for "locates" - finding the deadbeats - and then asks the courts to order child support.
"In a very high percentage of the cases, the contractor doesn't even do a 'locate,' " said Mr. Frumkin.
In 1995, he worked with Assistant Director Moira Dolan of the DC 37 Research and Negotiations Dept. to monitor the track record of Equifax, which had the $5.1 million contract through 1998 and negotiated one-year extensions until this year.

Maximus, the nation's largest welfare contractor, took over the work in April.

The union found that only about one of four Equifax investigations resulted in locates. Furthermore, a mere 15 percent of the locates led to actual court judgments requiring support payments.
Contractors often save money by using out-of-date computer lists and failing to verify that they have located the right person.

In many instances, Equifax took payments for identifying the wrong person. Some were dead, and sometimes they caught the parents of children whose cases had been closed.

"We find mistakes all the time," Mr. Frumkin said.

— Gregory N. Heires