NEWS RELEASE: BACKGROUND INFORMATION
January 21, 2000Subject: Recent improvements in child support payments
Project for the Improvement of Child Support Litigation Technology
http://www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/5910/index.htmlContact: Roger F. Gay, Project Leader
Picslt@mail.lawguru.com
Recent reports suggest an improvement in the rate of collection of child support payments in welfare cases. Florida, for example, recently announced an increase in payments from 20 percent to 54 percent of the amount due.
Some news reports are claiming this as a victory for the federal government clamp down on so-called "deadbeat dads." It needs to be understood that the evidence is to the contrary.
Federal enforcement policies include wage garnishment, suspension of divers licenses, and even jail sentences for child support debt. Nationwide, there are more than 50,000 government employees in the child support enforcement program. The cost of operating the program is around $4 billion each year. This expense includes nearly $4 billion spent over a period of years to develop a computerized system designed to track every person in the United States, their employment, their bank accounts, and other personal information.
The federal reforms that initiated most of the current child support enforcement policies went into effect in the early part of the 1990s. Implying that these reforms are responsible for the recent improvement in payments is simply incorrect. For years after the reforms went into effect, annual reports from the Office of Child Support Enforcement continued to show "collection rates" of less than 20 percent.
The nation's leading expert on divorced fathers pointed out the flaw early on. Arizona State University research psychologist Sanford Braver noticed that the primary cause of non-payment is that the person who is ordered to pay is unable to do so. He concluded that payments would increase in response to improvement in the economy -- particularly when the unemployment rate dropped.
Results are conclusive. We had several years with enforcement reforms in place without a significant drop in unemployment for relatively unskilled, uneducated workers. What might seem very obvious in hindsight is that there was no improvement in their rate of payment. When the drop in unemployment went far enough to include those workers, payment rates began to improve.
We just let too many years go by without reporting to the public that the expensive reforms were a failure. It was a poorly designed experiment that went predictably wrong. Under the reforms, approximately 20 million Americans were forced into the welfare system who do not want or need to be. The question remains whether the federal government will reverse the reforms and return control of their private lives to them.
The rate of compliance among all fathers is not the same as that for welfare cases. Fathers overall, pay from 70 percent (Census Bureau recipient only survey) to 80 percent (combined survey result) of what is due. The overall compliance rate is not as sensitive to ups and downs in the economy because better educated and skilled workers are better able to ride the waves. The compliance rate in the United States is high compared to most other countries and has been so for as long as statistics on child support payments have been collected.