Yet a further disgraceful waste of money from the public purse that’s been revealed through a freedom of information request and NOT picked up by the MP’s sitting on The Public Accounts Committee (PAC), who are are supposedly a crucial mechanism for ensuring transparency and accountability in government financial operations and who are also paid by the same public purse.

Quote Chris Heaton-Harris MP from PAC;
“Considering the CSA grinds every last penny out of fathers supporting their families and is the most bureaucratic and difficult agency to deal with in Government, it comes as a surprise that so much taxpayers’ money has been spent on such frivolous items.”
What a ridiculous statement by Heaton-Harris, who’s now paid a least £65,000+ pa from the public purse. It’s MP’s that passed the legislation through Parliament that the CSA operate.

The public purse appears to take a considerable bashing for frivolous items and has done for years from ALL angles, MP’s haven’t bee adverse to doing to same on top of their £64,000 + pa salaries, it’s not in the best interests of the public purse fund providers (Tax payers) or the UK.

chall

Corporal Leigh Eglon 2nd Battalion Parachute Regiment murdered by the CSA http://menmedia.co.uk/manchestereveningnews/news/s/164351_csa_demands_led_to_suicide

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/1525148/The-CSA-not-only-ended-my-fathers-life-it-ruined-mine-too.html

The Daily Telegraph

The CSA not only ended my father’s life, it ruined mine, too’
By Olga Craig
12:01AM BST 30 Jul 2006
Stacey McKay was five when her father Jim died. Driven beyond despair by the Child Support Agency’s demands for ever increasing maintenance payments for his children, he stacked his file of correspondence from the agency neatly on his kitchen table, climbed into his loft, tied a nylon cord noose to an overhead beam and hanged himself.
“I didn’t fully understand what had happened,” says Stacey, now 18.
“But I understood that my father had gone away and was never coming back. I knew I wouldn’t see him again and, after all these years, I still miss him. If it wasn’t for the CSA my Dad would be alive and I wouldn’t have grown up without a father.”
Jim McKay was not a “deadbeat dad” – one of the million or more fathers who reneged on their financial responsibility to their children and whose fecklessness the agency was set up to tackle.
He was, in CSA parlance, an “easy win” – a responsible parent willing to pay. A painter and decorator, he had just been forced to give up work after a knee operation, but even then was continuing to pay regular maintenance for Stacey and her younger brother, James.
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But ever changing assessments by the agency had been pushing up his payments and, on the morning of his death, he had received one more letter, this time telling him that he must pay £30 in maintenance from his £39.90 weekly sickness benefit.
“They expected him to live on a pittance,” says Stacey. “They put him under enormous pressure. In the end, they not only ended his life, but they ruined mine.”
Jim McKay was not alone in his anguished response to the agency’s bullying demands.
In the 13 years since the CSA became operational, more than 90 are thought to have committed suicide after being hounded by its agents: millions more lead impoverished and miserable lives – some because of being forced to make excessively high payments, others because the agency has failed to pursue absent parents who have left their children near-destitute.
Mr McKay and his daughter illustrate the shameful human cost of the agency. But what of the financial cost? The agency’s spreadsheet makes scandalous reading.
After £800 million was spent setting it up in 1993, the CSA was then “reformed” three years ago with £1billion. Last year, the agency wrote off £1billion of maintenance that it deemed “irrecoverable”.
In its 13 years, it has identified, but failed to collect, £3.5billion in due payments. It has a backlog of 330,000 cases and, while each is theoretically supposed to take six weeks to resolve, that process now takes nine months.
Last year alone the Department for Work and Pensions admitted that its enforcement unit spent £12million to collect just £8million. At the same time, only half of absent parents have made the exact payment deemed appropriate by the CSA, and 25 per cent pay nothing at all.
According to a National Audit Bureau report, a quarter of all maintenance payments as estimated by the agency are too low, depriving children of £15.8million annually.
Three years ago, when the CSA introduced a new £456million computer system to coincide with its reform, a shambles ensued. It contained 500 defects and, currently, 36,000 cases are “stuck” within it.
In spite of this, the consultants responsible for recommending the new system have received £2.7billion in taxpayers’ money, while Electronic Data Systems, the Texan firm that installed it, has since won a £2.6billion deal with the Department for Work and Pensions, the CSA’s parent body.
While the CSA has lurched from crisis to crisis, its annual report last year revealed that 28 staff bonuses, totalling £136,862, were dished out between 2002 and 2005. The bonuses, it transpired, were “hidden” under the category of salaries.
It is little wonder then that, having already confessed that the agency was ‘unfit for purpose’, John Hutton, the Works and Pensions secretary, announced last week that it was being scrapped to make way for a new, more streamlined system.
What he neglected to admit is that the agency is considered by many to be the biggest, and most costly, administrative fiasco in the history of the welfare state.
It is hardly surprising, then, that Edward Leigh, the Conservative chairman of the public accounts committee, said that the facts “beggar belief”. “It ranks among the worst public administration scandals in modern times,” he added.
The decision to axe the agency was taken by Mr Hutton after yet another highly critical report into the CSA this month, by Sir David Henshaw, the former chief executive of Liverpool city council.
While the Government has announced a new body will take its place, it has been loath to admit that it is unlikely the replacement will be up and running before 2008, leaving thousands of families trapped in the current shambolic system.
Not surprisingly, there seems little confidence that the new body will fare any better. Indeed, there are already grave concerns, once again about profligacy. To date, some £30million has been ploughed into setting up a team of private debt collectors to track down fathers who refuse to meet their financial obligations.
Kim Fellowes, the chairman of the CSA committee of Resolutions, an organisation of 5,000 lawyers, who advised Sir David Henshaw during his review, is sceptical. “Well, it can’t be as bad as the current system,” she says, not entirely optimistically.
“In theory, it should be better because, while its job will still be to recover maintenance from absent parents, its remit will be more narrow and thus it will be more streamlined.
Since those on benefit will no longer be compelled to go to the agency – and at present they make up 70 per cent of cases – and couples will be urged to reach an agreement, it will deal with many fewer cases.
My reservation is that among the new agency’s powers will be the ability to confiscate non-payers’ passports. The CSA currently has the right to take away driving licences. Yet, in the past year, it commandeered only five. There is no point in having strict sanctions if they are not used.”
Jedda Owusu, 44, the mother of two teenagers by her former partner, knows that to her cost. It was only when she forced the CSA to use its powers that she received any money.
Since her children’s father left 13 years ago, when Jedda junior was one and her brother, Weston, was two, Mrs Owusu has been battling for maintenance to be paid. Hers was one of those cases that the CSA finds particularly repellent: a feckless father who has avoided his responsibilities.
“I originally asked the children’s father for £10 a week for each of them,” Mrs Owusu explains. “He said I would never see a penny, and promptly disappeared.
I had to go to the CSA and I thought they would set a fair and just payment.
That was stupidly over-optimistic. After endless correspondence and countless telephone calls to the CSA – always to different people, loads of them unanswered – and endless badgering from me, they set up a Deduction of Earnings order in 1993 which meant he paid up – for three months.
Then he disappeared again. The CSA’s response was: ‘When you track him down, let us know’.”
The CSA held to this attitude until 1997, when Mrs Owusu hired a private detective. Within 24 hours, he discovered that her former partner had never even left his job.
He had simply gone freelance, thus ensuring any information on his whereabouts was safeguarded by the Data Protection Act. “The children and I were living in poverty by now.
The £100 cost of the detective was money I could ill afford,” she says. Again, she telephoned the CSA, even giving the agency her former partner’s work extension number. The agency calculated that she was owed £60,000, but did nothing to try to collect it.
After spending hours researching the law, Mrs Owusu told the CSA that it had the power to take a charging order on her former partner’s house to recover the debt.
“Their reply was that, because they had never done that, before they would only go for £20,000,” she says. Eventually, the CSA recovered the money but then promptly dropped Mrs Owusu’s case.
For Jedda junior, the process was deeply distressing. “It’s difficult having to accept that your Dad doesn’t want to know you,” she says. “My friends have dads, and it hurts me not to.”
Her mother refused to give up, even though she knows that the CSA no longer wants to know. “I was too much trouble for them,” she says. “What happens is that men who are willing to pay end up being penalised for those who won’t.”
The CSA has failed women like Mrs Owusu, but it could have all turned out so differently. In 1989, when Margaret Thatcher discovered that one million lone mothers were living on income benefit without, in 80 per cent of cases, any contribution from their former partners, she sent Tony Newton, then the social secretary, to Wisconsin to study the state’s system.
There, Irwin Garfinkel, the man who masterminded the idea, gave him two golden rules: do not make budget savings the main aim of the policy; and do not make the system retrospective. Mr Newton ignored his advice and chaos ensued.
Within a year of its inception, in 1994, Ros Hepplewhite, its chief executive, resigned amid abject apologies that the agency “did not reach acceptable levels”. Two years later, her successor, Ann Chant, left, admitting “failure”. In 2004, her replacement, Doug Smith, also departed, to much derision, claiming to be “seriously disappointed” by the agency’s performance.
A year before he left, Mr Smith had introduced the agency’s new computer system. Soon afterwards, it was deemed a “chronic failure”. In its first 18 months, 88 per cent of claimants had received no payment. “The system was wildly over-complicated,” says Tony Collins, of Computer Weekly magazine.
“Basically they built a 20-floor tower block when a five-storey building would have sufficed. It was designed so that you could not progress with a claim if even one piece of information was missing.
Thus staff would just go on to another claim, leaving the last one in their pending tray. And the pending tray was overflowing. Frustrated with a system that wasn’t working, some began falsifying information.”
In a 2005 report into the CSA commissioned by the Department for Work and Pensions, the list of revelations was shocking. Demoralised staff – poorly paid (their average salary £12,000) and lacking the training to deal with distressed parents – balked at using such an unwieldy computer system.
Staff revealed that they had been told to target particular claims because they were “easy to process and would look good on the statistics”. When computer-based phone systems were installed, staff directed difficult calls to answer machines or turned down the volume on the phones. A third of calls went unanswered.
In the meantime, dozens of men were committing suicide because of the CSA’s over-zealous hounding. Most, if not all, were responsible fathers who had became overwhelmed by years of frustrating arguments with and bullying by the CSA.
“I know how they felt, at times I have come close to killing myself,” says Martin Tyler, from Bristol. In four years, the CSA has made 27 different assessments to calculate his maintenance payments.
Mr Tyler has a six-year old son, James, from a past relationship, and a three-year-old, Jack, with his wife, Tracey.
Employed as an insurance salesman, his salary fluctuates. His payments for James, however, are based upon the single year in which he earned a maximum bonus.
Even though eight of the nine grievances he has brought up with the independent complaints examiner were upheld, he was awarded a meagre £45 compensation and remains crippled by maintenance payments.
From his £2,000 net salary a month, he must pay £900 for his first son. “I love James. I travel 400 miles to see him, often having to borrow the money to buy petrol,” he says.
“But that leaves £1,100 a month for me, my wife, second son and Tracey’s two daughters to survive on. The girls’ father does not contribute, but the CSA refuses to take that into account.”
Many who have bitter experience of the CSA are under no illusions that things will improve when the new body takes over. It seems that there will be little provision, once again, for chasing feckless fathers.
Yet the agency’s remit is more important than ever. Thirteen years on, there are now 700,000 more single parents than there were in 1993.
Unless the Government starts addressing the problem realistically, there are many, such as Jedda Owusu, who believe that thousands more children will find themselves the victims of misplaced idealism.