HILO, Hawai'i — A Kona grand jury has indicted a former Big Island man for alleged failure to pay child support and attempting to evade state excise taxes, and a Hilo prosecutor said he expects more charges to be filed in new child support cases this week.

One indictment filed last week accuses David K. Borges Sr. of persistent nonsupport for allegedly failing to provide child support that he was able to provide for a 15-year-old child, a 16-year-old child and a 10-year-old child. All three children live on the Big Island.

A second indictment names Borges and a company called Dave's Concrete Inc., of Captain Cook, alleging Borges and the company attempted to evade excise taxes in 2007, and deliberately failed to file an excise tax return for the 2006 tax year.

The indictment also alleges Borges willfully failed to file state income and excise tax returns for 2006, and failed to file an excise tax return for 2005.

Borges left the state in 2006, according to the indictment, but Deputy Prosecutor Rick Damer-ville said authorities know where to find him, and if necessary, will extradite him to face charges. If convicted, Borges could face up to five years in prison for each of the counts of deliberately evading state taxes.

The cases against Borges were developed by a new unit in the Big Island county prosecutor's office dedicated to filing criminal charges against absent parents who have the ability to make court-ordered child support payments but fail to do so.

To persistently and deliberately evade child support obligations is a misdemeanor punishable by up to a year in jail, but few people have been prosecuted under the Hawai'i law.

Legislators last year provided money to the state attorney general's office to hire staff to pursue civil contempt-of-court cases against scofflaw parents statewide.

Child support collection cases in Hawai'i traditionally have been handled as civil matters. But the new Big Island unit is using criminal prosecution tools, such as search warrants, to seek out hidden assets belonging to so-called "deadbeat" parents. Damerville, who has predicted the unit would turn up evidence of other crimes, such as welfare and Social Security fraud, tax evasion and under-the-table cash employment arrangements, last week said that is exactly what is happening.

Damerville refused to discuss specific cases, but said: "Sometimes there will be cases where somebody willfully fails to pay $50 a month in child support, and the bear comes back to bite 'em because he's got a lot bigger tax problems and federal problems and welfare fraud problems and everything else."

He added, "The whole intent of prosecution is to get people out there to understand they have to pay their child support if they are capable of doing it, and we will use the entire Hawai'i Revised Statutes to protect the keiki of the County of Hawai'i."

Damerville estimated that when he finishes work on the current batch of cases pending in his office, the new units will have filed charges or obtained indictments in about 10 cases.

One case has been referred to the state attorney general's office and Maui prosecutors for possible charges, and another has been sent to the U.S. attorney's office for possible federal prosecution, he said.

A recent report by the state auditor found the Child Support Enforcement Agency collected just 55 percent of the current payments due in fiscal year 2005, and collected on only about 41 percent of its delinquent accounts. The state was ranked last in the nation that year for its delinquency collection rate in a federal ranking of 54 jurisdictions, according to the state audit.

As of June 2006, the agency had about 120,000 child-support cases, and some estimates are that 8,000 people on the Big Island alone are seriously behind on their child-support payments.