Half of Michigan's FOC Officials Do Not Trust Their Own Data System. Kalamazoo's FOC Uses It to Make Decisions About Your Family.

48 percent say MiCSES is inaccurate. 11 percent do not use it at all. These are the numbers behind the enforcement actions taken against Kalamazoo County parents.

KALAMAZOO, Mich., April 1, 2026 — Michigan tracks child support cases through a system called MiCSES. It is the database the state uses to report enforcement performance to the federal government. Federal funding depends on those numbers. The Kalamazoo County FOC uses MiCSES to track cases, enforcement actions, and compliance for every family in its system.

When the University of Michigan asked FOC officials statewide whether MiCSES accurately reflected what their offices were doing, 48 percent said no. Nearly half the people running the system said the data could not be trusted.

11 percent of FOC offices reported not using MiCSES at all. Another 62 percent said they use it only partially. That means 73 percent of Michigan's FOC offices are either not recording their enforcement activities in the state system or recording them incompletely.

Some offices reported zero enforcement activities of certain types in MiCSES. Not because they were not doing them. Because they were not logging them. Workers in the same office recorded activities differently. The data was inconsistent from desk to desk.

This is the system that generates the numbers the Kalamazoo FOC relies on. The compliance rates, the enforcement records, the case histories. When the FOC decides to issue a bench warrant or pursue contempt against a Kalamazoo parent, the data behind that decision sits in a system that half the state's own officials say is unreliable.

The Kalamazoo County FOC already operates with no independent oversight and a grievance process that has never ruled in favor of a citizen. Now add this. The data foundation those decisions rest on is one that the people who built it do not trust.

“You cannot claim the system works if you cannot accurately measure what the system does. Kalamazoo families deserve better than decisions built on data the state does not trust.,” stated Kalamazoo Transparency Act.