Right step to help child support

District Attorney Noel Waters' move to hire extra help in order to break up the backlog of child-support cases in his office was a welcome - if long overdue - effort to get money into the hands of people who need it.

Unfortunately, it took complaints to the Nevada Appeal and inquiries from a reporter for Waters to realize that his staff was telling mothers it could take up to five months to open a case.

In the meantime, families were simply going without, borrowing from friends and relatives, or racking up debts on their own credit cards.

Even when mothers did most of the investigative work in tracking down fathers, filing paperwork, and making endless phone calls to try to keep their cases alive, all too often they got no support from the District Attorney's Office and ended up with no money in the mailbox.

How Waters or his staff could be unaware of the massive problems is beyond us. Seldom a day goes by that we don't hear a horror story about some bungled child-support case. An entire organization - Association for Children for Enforcement of Support - exists to try to help parents through the thicket of Nevada's system.

Perhaps, after a point, they just stopped listening.

There is no doubt the state's ill-conceived NOMADS computer, designed to be an aid to the system, is now an albatross around the neck of district attorneys. Far too many resources are being fed to the cumbersome task of making NOMADS work by an Oct. 1 deadline.

But NOMADS is also sometimes used as a handy excuse. Many mothers to whom we've spoken say they had a hard time getting any response long before NOMADS became the issue.

Child-support collection is a tough, frustrating job. We don't envy those who must fight through the regulations and court orders to get to the fathers (and sometimes mothers) not eager to pay their share.

But we have a great deal more sympathy for the parents trying to raise children without the money they deserve.