Tracking Down the Child-Support Deadbeat

It may become significantly easier to collect past-due child support, thanks partly to keen government interest in fixing the nation’s ailing welfare system.

Congress, with the support of President Clinton, is considering a host of initiatives that would make it easier to establish paternity, find non-custodial parents and penalize child-support scofflaws.

These initiatives are not all new. Some have already been implemented in California, Illinois, Arizona, Kansas, Massachusetts, Oklahoma and Oregon.

But congressional action would make the reforms national in scope and would aid millions of families that have been unable to enforce child-support judgments because the paying spouse moved out of state.

Child support is a welfare issue because roughly a quarter of the recipients of Aid to Families with Dependent Children--the nation’s cornerstone welfare program--would need less government support if they could collect court-ordered support payments for their children, government officials say.

However, it’s not just welfare recipients who are owed child support. About half of all “custodial parents”--90% of them are women--are not collecting all the child support their children are due. About 25% of the children who are owed support from an absent parent get nothing; another 24% receive only part of what they’re owed, government officials say. About 30% of these children live in households collecting welfare, officials estimate.

The solutions being debated in Congress attack non-payment of child support on several fronts. First, they would make it somewhat easier to establish paternity by sponsoring a voluntary process at the hospital that would allow both parents to sign the birth certificate. The father’s signature would create a “presumption” of paternity.

While not legally binding, this declaration of fatherhood gives government officials somewhere to start when attempting to establish support agreements later. It’s important to do this at the hospital because about 90% of fathers attend the birth of their children, even when the parents are not married and do not intend to maintain a relationship, says Michael Kharfen, spokesman for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Administration for Children and Families.

Many welfare mothers profess to know no more than the father’s first name when child-support officials start looking for a working parent to pay back the welfare system, says Leslie Frye, chief of the Office of Child Support at the California Department of Social Services in Sacramento.

Second, Congress would create a new-hire databank. This would require employers to supply the names and Social Security numbers of newly hired employees. This information could be used to locate missing parents and establish child-support withholding orders.

These orders require employers to withhold court-mandated child-support payments from a parent’s paycheck each month. The money is sent directly to the custodial parent--or to a state welfare agency, if that custodial parent is receiving government aid.

Legislators also propose to create a national information bank that states could tap to track and collect from parents who have fled their home states. About a third of all child-support cases involve a parent who has moved across state lines, government officials say. Since child-support enforcement is now handled by individual states--and each state has different rules--a simple relocation can make it difficult to collect.

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Finally, there’s an effort afoot to suspend, revoke or simply not renew occupational, professional, trade, business, hobby and driver’s licenses of parents who have past-due child-support bills. While some say license revocation is too extreme, it has been among the most successful child-support experiments conducted at the state level, says Marilyn Ray Smith, president of the National Child Support Enforcement Assn. and chief legal counsel for the Massachusetts Child Support Enforcement Division.

Nineteen states have implemented various license revocation programs, she says. The threat of revocation alone is often enough to spur payment, Smith says.

In Maine, which launched a driver’s license revocation program in mid-1994, the state collected $23 million in back child support from 12,520 parents--60% of the targeted group--within a year of sending out its first notices. Maine has had to revoke only a handful of licenses.

California launched a program to deny new or renewed occupational and professional licenses to child-support deadbeats last year. It has collected about $10 million from 10,160 delinquent parents. Ultimately, about 70% of those who owe are expected to pay up, a government spokesman says. The program affects workers in about 150 jobs--from real estate to cosmetology--that require a state license.

Montana sent warning notices to 800 delinquent parents. Within three months, $120,000 was collected; 153 of those parents agreed to pay in installments, and 72 employers agreed to withhold child-support payments from workers’ paychecks.

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It is impossible to say when a national program might take effect. While many of the initiatives have wide support, Congress is unpredictable and has a fairly full agenda. In the meantime, more states are passing laws to strengthen child-support enforcement.