Child support was originally the domain of state courts, in which traditional precepts of family law were used to resolve what were considered private disputes. Historically, most cases were brought to the attention of the system only if the parent legally entitled to support filed an action to enforce this right. Judges followed no uniform standards in setting awards, so that there were wide variations in the amounts ordered, even among similarly situated parties. Recent research suggests that, as a result, awards for NCPs generally were set at lower levels than many absent parents (usually the fathers) were actually able to pay, and their children paid the price. As divorce rates and births outside marriage began to increase rapidly, the inequities and inefficiencies of the child support system became a matter of public concern.
It was with the aim of introducing greater standardization of enforcement, producing more child support payments, and reducing growing welfare costs that the federal government began to play a major role in child support, starting with the 1975 amendment to the Social Security Act creating the federal Child Support Enforcement, or IV-D, program. While states and localities retained primary responsibility for administering the IV-D system, the newly created federal Office of Child Support Enforcement (OCSE) was charged with approving state plans for delivering services and providing oversight, monitoring, and technical assistance. Federal funding for IV-D programs, in the form of matching funds and incentive payments, was also authorized. And AFDC recipients were required, as a condition of continued eligibility for benefits, to assign their rights to support to the AFDC program and to cooperate in finding their child’s father. Through these measures, it was hoped, some AFDC costs would be offset with increased child support collections, and some families might be prevented from going on assistance.
Congress has responded to the continuing need to improve CSE performance on the state and local level with a variety of measures that expand the federal oversight role. Many of the reforms are designed to strengthen the capacity of IV-D systems through automation. For instance, federal matching funds at a rate of 90 percent were made available to states to develop automated information systems. The Federal Parent Locator Service (FPLS), providing ways to match CSE cases against other federal administrative records, was established. The 1996 welfare law continues the trend toward easing access to information on individuals. Among other things, states are now required to obtain access to private and public records on individuals without the necessity of a court order, and state IV-D agencies must exchange information with an expanded list of state and federal databases. States must also give administrative subpoena power to their IV-D agencies.
Other measures addressed speed and standardization of results. Performance standards for paternity establishment were set; states were encouraged to develop expedited processes for establishing and enforcing support orders; they were required to develop and use uniform guidelines to determine award levels; and they had to review support levels and make appropriate modifications at least every three years in public-assistance-related cases. The new welfare law takes these efforts a step further by strengthening in-hospital paternity establishment requirements and mandating that states establish centralized collection and disbursement units.
Enforcement techniques have been progressively strengthened over the years. Immediate and automatic income-withholding has been made the rule; and tools such as tax intercepts, property liens, and license revocations are becoming more widely used. The 1996 welfare law requires states to use a variety of administrative enforcement mechanisms that depend on automated case processing instead of case-by-case handling. Liens must now be able to be issued administratively, and states must have the authority to withhold, suspend, and restrict occupational and driver’s licenses.
I. CSE Reform: A Middle-Class Paradigm
Although advances in CSE techniques have been driven to a large extent by the desire to reduce welfare spending, they have proven to be best suited for identification and location of NCPs who are stably employed and housed, with income and assets. PFS research reveals that while some of the NCPs in welfare-related cases do in fact fit this profile, others live at the margins of society. Many PFS participants have sporadic work histories, characterized by frequent job changes. Some have no fixed place of residence, living in a succession of relatives’ and friends’ homes. Understanding how these NCPs’ lives differ from the norm is key to successfully adapting CSE practices to reach them.
The importance of NCPs’ socioeconomic status can be illustrated by looking at the problem of location. Parent location services that establish links to information sources such as credit bureaus, tax authorities, employment security agencies, and motor vehicle bureaus work only for NCPs who earn a regular income or own assets. Moreover, these automated systems cannot operate in "real time" because of lags in the reporting of information. Thus, they are effective only when NCPs stay put long enough for the records to reflect their current circumstances.
To a large extent, unemployed low-income men live outside many of the systems on which CSE-related information-gathering depends. When they find work, they tend to hold onto those jobs for shorter periods of time than their higher-income counterparts, frustrating the IV-D system’s attempts to keep track of them. Further, they are much less likely to be tied to other government institutions than higher-income NCPs or low-income women. Experience from PFS suggests, for example, that unemployed low-income men are much less likely to receive public assistance or other social services or to participate in government-funded employment programs than are their female partners. Thus, reforms that focus on increasing and speeding up the IV-D system’s access to public and private databases may be irrelevant to locating many low-income men. Indeed, the most reliable source of information about unemployed low-income NCPs’ current status may be the family and friends of the NCPs or the custodial parents (CPs) themselves.
Besides making them hard to locate, the lack of stability in many unemployed low-income NCPs’ lives renders problematic application of the usual standards for determining appropriate award levels. For instance, state guidelines that fix awards based on a proportion of income assume a steady income over time, punctuated at most by only brief periods of unemployment. But periodic unemployment may be an unavoidable fact of life for many low-income NCPs, especially if they are men of color facing job discrimination in inner cities with weak job markets. For them, imputing steady earnings — even at a low wage — can dramatically overstate their "potential income." The difficulty of determining potential income may be greatest among unemployed low-income NCPs; some are in the midst of temporary spells of unemployment and low earnings, while others will suffer through long periods of poverty.
The use of state income guidelines to determine award levels may not make adequate provision for those cases in which NCPs are truly destitute. Many PFS participants complain that the award levels mandated by the guidelines are unrealistically high, and that after child support is deducted they do not have enough to live on. While some PFS participants acknowledged that they did not make regular support payments, they claimed to make occasional cash contributions or to help in other ways, by buying food, diapers, and other necessities, as their cash flow permitted. The fact that direct payments to CPs on welfare are treated as fraud, or that in-kind contributions are not counted by the IV-D system toward support, is widely viewed by these NCPs as inequitable.
The IV-D agencies participating in PFS tried to respond to these concerns in a variety of ways. Existing awards for PFS participants were either reduced or suspended as long as they complied with program requirements; and procedures for upward or downward modification of awards in response to changes in the NCPs’ employment circumstances were streamlined. Other areas of concern, however, such as treatment of accumulated arrearages and in-kind contributions, were beyond the scope of this project.
In sum, welfare-related child support cases present special challenges for IV-D agencies. Despite efforts to promote the enforcement of all cases, those in which the obligors have no discernible employment or assets are not considered a high priority because they offer little prospect of return and are labor- and time-intensive as well. This is especially true when the caseworkers carry a huge caseload, as in all of the PFS sites. But in giving short shrift to AFDC-related cases, the IV-D agencies sacrifice their ability to distinguish between the "unwilling" and the "unable" or to identify those obligors against whom enforcement is simply not appropriate.
Chronically unemployed or underemployed NCPs also present a challenge to CSE policies designed to standardize support payment levels. Reforms such as state guidelines on award levels and practices such as the imputing of income were in large part a response to historic abuses, and in the case of most obligors they work reasonably well. But the experience of the PFS sites suggests that when dealing with NCPs who are living on the fringes of society, some flexibility on the part of the IV-D system in terms of setting payment levels, imputing income, and implementing modification procedures may be appropriate.
At the policy level, investing resources to locate and enforce appropriately against the most disadvantaged NCPs goes against the national trend toward standardization and mechanization of enforcement. But at the ground level, a more individualized and flexible approach is not entirely inconsistent with current practices. We found that line staff in PFS sites still exercise a certain degree of discretion, even in jurisdictions where computerized systems are designed to prompt caseworkers to take specific measures depending on the status of the case. And in those sites where staff do not have automated tickler lists, the potential for individual variation is even greater. We also observed CSE staff working with NCPs who appeared to be trying to meet their obligation, giving them some leeway because of their good faith efforts. These findings suggest that those who work in the IV-D system want to be able to deal more flexibly with unemployed low-income obligors.
II. The PFS Participants’ Experience of the IV-D System
In PFS, where over three-fourths of the research sample is African-American or Hispanic, CSE issues are inextricably entwined with race. Communities of color, especially the African-American community, have long had a troubled history with law enforcement. The days of state-sanctioned police violence against members of these communities are within living memory; indeed, newspaper headlines remind us daily that police brutality remains a serious problem. African-American men are arrested, convicted, and incarcerated disproportionately in relation to their numbers, and in many black communities it is an article of faith that the criminal justice system is out to get black men. For those who share that belief, it is a small leap to the conviction, expressed by many PFS participants, that the CSE system is simply part of a larger pattern of persecution.
The institutional links between the CSE and regular criminal justice systems are, of course, real. Most PFS sites report that the majority of NCPs arrested for outstanding child support warrants are originally detained as a result of regular police arrests for offenses unrelated to child support. Moreover, the racial and gender makeup of the staff in various agencies involved in the enforcement process echoes that of the criminal justice system, increasing the NCPs’ feelings of alienation. Court or administrative staff who process NCPs through the bureaucratic intricacies are often female, with an increasing proportion of males and a larger percentage of white staff as one goes up the hierarchy within the CSE agency and the courts. Most formal hearings are held in courtrooms presided over by white judges. African-American NCPs, in particular, are dubious about getting a fair shake from a system that looks very much to them like a part of law enforcement in general.
The NCPs in PFS overwhelmingly report feeling that they are not given a chance to be heard at their hearings. They perceive that the dice are loaded in favor of the CPs, not understanding that the lawyers facing them across the table are representing the state (more specifically the CSE agency and welfare department) and not the CPs. Eager to tell their side of the story, these NCPs often find that judges and court personnel are indifferent to the facts of their particular case, often because they are legally irrelevant to the issue of whether NCPs have met child support obligations. For instance, allegations that a CP refuses to grant visitation with the child or is squandering her money rather than using it to provide for the child are not germane to the question of whether there is a legal support obligation. Not understanding these concepts can lead to feelings of frustration and humiliation among NCPs.
Not surprisingly, many PFS participants display cynicism and hostility toward a system they view as unconcerned with the harsh realities of their lives and interested only in squeezing money out of them. Some, for instance, cited payment allocation rules under AFDC, requiring all but the first $50 of child support collected to go to the state to pay off the welfare debt, as justification for their noncooperation with the system. They were vociferous in complaining about the unfairness of having the bulk of their payments go to the state and federal government rather than to their children.
Such negative attitudes undoubtedly have an impact on the CSE system’s ability to gain even minimal cooperation from NCPs. In conducting the initial outreach to potential PFS-eligible NCPs, the program sites sent out thousands of hearing notices. But, as discussed elsewhere in this report, the appearance rate was generally low. Without the means to go after the nonresponders, the PFS sites were forced to rely on "voluntary" compliance in what appears from the outside to be among the most mandatory of institutions. No doubt many of those who did not show up were motivated primarily by the desire to avoid their obligations; for them, the most appropriate response may be to strengthen available sanctions with greater certainty of punishment. But these findings also suggest the possibility that some NCPs’ noncooperation is rooted in negative attitudes about the IV-D system that are carried over from their experience with law enforcement in general. For these NCPs, better outreach and education efforts might engender more cooperation with the system.
Proceed to the next chapter.
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