PA Jails Man Four Times for Child Support for Child who’s not His

Here’s another story about the child support enforcement system run amok.  If I were to bet, I’d put my money on the taxpayers of Pennsylvania footing the bill for their “public servants’” incompetence and apparent malice.

Walter Andre Sharpe has filed a civil suit for damages against Montgomery County, Pennsylvania child support officials for wrongfully charging him with child support for a child who is not his and has apparently been in the custody of its real father all along.  In the process, he alleges, they altered their own records to make it appear that Walter was actually the child’s father.  When he failed to pay, they had him thrown in jail four times. 

The fact that the actual father seems to have had custody of the child all along raises the question of why child support officials were trying to tag a man with child support.  If they thought support was owed, shouldn’t they have been looking for a woman?

To all of the above, add bureaucratic laziness.  As this article states, it took the Patriot News newspaper less than an hour to locate the real father who had custody of the child (Penn Live, 5/12/09). 

As I said, you can bank on the taxpayers of the State of Pennsylvania paying for this latest example of child support zeal.

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