£82m owed to Child Support Agency

The money is owed to the CSA over a 16-year period

The Child Support Agency in Northern Ireland has been criticised for failing to collect more than £82m in maintenance payments.

The CSA is not allowed to write off debt and the £82.6m represents money owed to them up over sixteen years.

The Northern Ireland Audit Office, which examines the finances of government departments, said the situation was unacceptable.

But Mary Quinn of the CSA said the service was improving.

The Audit Office said the CSA had not set high enough debt collection targets.

In the financial year ending in March 2008 - the target was £1.5m - yet during that year the agency's debt increased by £11.6m.

That target has now been increased to £2.5m, but Auditor General John Dowall said he was disappointed the target was lower than the amount by which debt is increasing by year on year.

He said more than £35m of the money could be collected.

He also said he was concerned at the level of mistakes made in calculating child support.

It is unacceptable because parents are failing to pay for their children Mary Quinn Child Support Agency

In a random sample his office found errors in more than a third - which he said was unacceptable.

Mr Dowdall acknowledged the CSA was two years into a three-year project to improve the situation.

But he said: "Despite the changes that have taken place already in the first two years of the project, controlling debt evidently continues to be a problem for the CSA with ever increasing debt levels."

Mary Quinn, head of maintenance enforcement at the CSA, said it was not easy to make some parents pay.

But she said the agency was "making significant improvements" in the service.

Children 'suffer'

"It is unacceptable because parents are failing to pay for their children," she said.

"The lengths that some parents will go to to avoid paying for their child maintenance are really extreme.

"We need to have the non-payment of child maintenance socially unacceptable in the same way as drink driving is now socially unacceptable."

Sinn Fein's Paul Maskey, chairman of the assembly's public accounts committee, said: "It's the children who actually suffer from this, because the children, the most vulnerable in our society, need to be given some of these payments.

"There wouldn't be a week goes past when some of us aren't dealing with issues like this when people are calling into our constituency offices with regards to payments from CSA.

"It can take many months to get some issues resolved, if you get them resolved at all."

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