An interesting flap emerged last week between Hennepin County and the Minnesota Department of Human Services over whether the county was closing dormant child support cases too quickly -- and without legal justification. An initial review suggested as many as 217 child support cases in Hennepin County were inappropriately closed -- with a total of $5.9 million still owed in those cases, according to figures provided by DHS.

The dispute -- spurred by a Channel 5 report -- seems in many ways to be an administrative matter over whether the county is following the letter of state and federal law. Officials from both agencies acknowledged that the closed cases at issue involved debts that deadbeat parents were unlikely to pay in full or at all. The cases the county closed -- inappropriately as it turned out -- had not seen payments in years and involved children who were now adults.

In some ways, the issue behind this dispute is the more interesting one: the lingering impact of the last economic recession that has left child support payers and payees struggling to make ends meet and raise healthy children.

"If we thought there was money out there that could be used for the support of a child, we'd be going for it," said Deborah Huskins, an area director for the county's human services and public health department. "These are cases where we don't think that is going to be the result ... Most of these people (owing money) are in desperate straights themselves. There are a lot of people who have fallen on hard times ... The fact of the matter is they don't have any money themselves or the money they do have is a form of public assistance that is not collectable under federal and state law."

The life circumstances don't necessarily matter, nor does the county have the legal authority to close a child support case just because a payment hasn't been made in a long time, said Anne Barry, deputy commissioner of the state human services department. Philosophically, that would set a bad precedent to deadbeat parents that they could avoid paying if they just stayed out of sight for for enough years.

"We get federal money because the federal government expects us to implement policies on these programs, which includes the belief that if an obligation is owed, an obligation is owed," Barry said. "Just because a payment hasn't been made in five years doesn't mean that an obligation isn't going to be fulfilled … None of us should be comfortable with that."

The specter of losing federal money is driving this dispute. The county had been closing dormant cases in part because it is judged by the federal government on the percent of cases in which payments are made. If the county's batting average is too low, so to speak, it could lose federal funding. But Barry said the financial penalties would likely be worse if a federal audit found that the county wasn't following the law and was closing cases prematurely.

The state conducted another review of closed cases last week and found that Hennepin County isn't the only offender. There were numerous cases in Ramsey County and statewide in which child support cases were closed without adequate justification. The state has ordered that these cases be re-opened, making the counties responsible for overseeing them and pursuing payment from deadbeat parents if at all possible again. County officials are hoping for changes in state legislation that would legally define hopeless collection cases and give them adequate justification to close them out.