DATABASE TO TRACK DEADBEATS.

Byline: Robert Pear The New York Times

Enforcement of child support obligations enters a new era Oct. 1, when the federal government will start operating a computerized directory showing every person newly hired by every employer in the country so federal and state investigators can track down parents who owe money to their children.

States will be able to use the directory to locate parents and dun them, typically by securing court orders to employers to deduct child support from wages and salaries.

Keeping track of parents who move from state to state is one of the most difficult tasks in collecting child support, officials say. More than 30 percent of the 19 million child support cases involve parents who do not live in the same state as their children.

President Clinton will soon announce the National Directory of New Hires, which is required by the 1996 welfare law. But the directory is not just for welfare recipients. It will record basic information, including names, addresses, Social Security numbers and wages for everyone hired after Oct. 1 for a full- or part-time job by an employer of any size.

It will be one of the largest, most up-to-date files of personal information kept by the government. Michael Kharfen, a spokesman for the Department of Health and Human Services, said the government expected to receive data on 60 million newly hired employees a year. Wages must be reported every three months; the government expects to receive 160 million wage reports each quarter.

The size and scope of the database have raised concerns about the potential for intrusions on privacy.

Federal and state officials predict that the new federal directory, combined with similar directories in all states, will produce billions of dollars in new child support payments. States like New York, Texas and Missouri, which have required the reporting of newly hired workers in the last few years, say the procedure has been extremely helpful in locating absent parents.

In New York, Daniel Hogan, a spokesman for the state's Department of Family Assistance, said that 3 million people had been hired in the last year and that more than 5 percent of them had been found, through matching of computer files, to owe child support.

When people change jobs, Hogan said, New York officials inform the new employers of any child support obligations so the money can immediately be withheld from wages.

``We don't give them an opportunity to become deadbeats,'' Hogan said. ``The biggest problem facing us in child support enforcement is people who move out of state. The best part of the federal reform is that it will allow us to break down barriers state to state.''

Health and Human Services will maintain a separate register listing everyone who owes or is owed child support. It will check each new employee against the list of child support orders to see if the worker owes any money.

Thomas Neal, a child support specialist in the Texas Attorney General's Office, said: ``The national directory will tremendously enhance our ability to locate absent parents and collect child support. Before now, we did not have a good mechanism to know that another state was looking for an individual who might be working in Texas.''

Despite the enthusiasm of state officials, Robert Gellman, an expert on privacy and information policy, expressed concern that the new data would be misused.

``The government is creating a gigantic new database with very broad uses and very little attention paid to the protection of personal privacy,'' he said. ``Private detectives will find a friend in the police department or a child welfare office to give them access to information in the directory of new hires. That already happens with criminal, medical and credit records.''

Gellman predicted that Congress would increase the number of people authorized to use the new directory, just as it has expanded the list of officials with access to federal tax return information over the years.