Too Little, Too Late? : Full Child Support: Small Steps

Sue Speir, a divorced mother of two in Long Beach, considers herself a victim of the American system of child support.

Speir says that she tracked her former husband, who has since died, to Illinois, Arizona and finally Texas in her efforts to collect support payments.

“He was in Arizona for six years and he didn’t pay it, and then he moved to Texas,” she said. Each time he moved to another state, she had to open a new claim. She took him to court twice in Arizona, where a judge cut the payments in half--from $200 a month to $100--in the vain hope that he would be more likely to pay.

“For the custodial parent, it’s really draining,” said Speir, who now heads a child-support advocacy group called SPUNK (Single Parents United N’Kids). “You get beat down by the system.”

New Federal Rules

Because her plight is becoming increasingly common, Congress stiffened federal child-support requirements last year when it overhauled the welfare system. The new provisions will, among other things, tighten regulation of state enforcement and eventually require employers to deduct court-ordered support payments from the paychecks of fathers who fall behind in their obligations.

Yet families cannot count on immediate results. Although child-support experts publicly applaud the new law, they privately complain that its provisions are too flabby and will take effect too late (some as late as 1994) to help today’s struggling single mothers.

Doug Besharov of the American Enterprise Institute said that most advocates entertain hopes that the changes will do some good, but acknowledge that it probably will not.

“Passing a law saying that a man should support his children,” he said, “is very much like passing a law saying drug addicts should stop using drugs.”

Delayed Impact Seen

Georgetown University economist Laurie Bassi predicts that the withholding of payments from delinquent fathers’ wages will not begin to have a serious impact before the year 2000.

“The act is a definite step in the right direction,” she said, “and it is going to make an improvement in people’s ability to collect, but it will be a long time coming. States are incredibly slow and very resistant to federal intervention.”

Wayne A. Stanton, director of the federal Office of Child Support Enforcement, said he expects to see measurable progress. One provision, requiring judges to follow state guidelines in setting child-support awards, could increase by 50% the amount of support being paid nationwide, he said.

There is enormous room for improvement. The most recent Census Bureau figures show that $11 billion in child support was owed in 1985, but nearly $4 billion of it was not paid.

Of the 5.4 million women legally entitled to support payments for their children in 1985, about 48% received full payment, 27% received partial payment and 26% received no payment. Payments during that year averaged $2,215 for each mother.

The child-support picture had deteriorated somewhat since 1983. About 51% of eligible mothers received full payment that year, and 24% received nothing. And the average annual payment, after adjustment for inflation, was $2,528.

If the new system does not revolutionize the collection of support payments, most experts say it cannot be any worse than the old, under which the states ran their own support systems with federal standards largely unenforced.

Hardship Splits Family

That old system has taken its toll. Consider the case of a Santa Clara woman with three daughters who, unable to collect the payments their father owed, sent the two younger girls to live with him in Oklahoma because she could not afford to keep them.

“There was no way that we could live on my salary alone,” she said. “My children are teen-agers, and they understand that they’re not able to get everything they want (if they live with her). My ex-husband is self-employed, and he made $1.4 million in 1985. From November of 1985 to the middle of 1988, I received $1,300 in child support.”

The federal government began to play a role in child support in 1974, when Congress required states to collect such payments owed to women on welfare. Before that, all support payments were sent directly to the custodial parent, just as they still are in families that deal privately with support.

As early as 1984, Congress called on states to withhold some of the wages of absent fathers who were 30 days in arrears, but in the absence of vigorous federal enforcement, many of the states did not follow through.

States Fail Tests

Geraldine Jensen, founder and national director of the Assn. for Children for Enforcement of Support in Toledo, Ohio, said that 48 states, including California, flunked a federal audit and were found to be out of compliance with the 1984 law.

The mother of a 6-year-old boy in San Jose knows from bitter experience that the 1984 federal law lacked teeth. In 1986, she said, her ex-husband stopped paying after having paid for eight months.

“I attached his wages and collected for six months, and then he quit his job,” she said. “He says he’s not working now, but the money’s coming from somewhere.”

Meanwhile, she is having trouble making ends meet. “I went from $50,000 a year to $18,000 with no car, no furniture, no clothes,” she said. “The first year of my divorce, I had nothing.”

Under the new law, beginning in 1990, employers are to deduct child support from the father’s pay in all cases in which the mother has sought state help in collecting--not just when the family is welfare-dependent.

Also as of 1990, states will be authorized to use Social Security numbers to trace delinquent fathers. Once a father who is liable for withholding is found, his employer will be instructed to deduct the correct amount for child support and send it to a state agency that will channel it to the mother.

Built-In Withholding

And, starting in 1994, all new child-support awards will provide for payroll withholding of payments unless the parents agree that it is unnecessary.

Some private child-support advocates are not confident that even this mechanism will work. “I think it’s foolish to think that states that are not following the old law will begin following the new law,” Jensen said.

But Stanton, director of the federal child-support office, predicted that “in November, 1990, automatic wage withholding will make a dramatic difference.”

Stanton pointed out that the new law carries stiff penalties for states that fail to enforce wage withholding against delinquent fathers. In the first year of noncompliance, states stand to lose 1% of their federal funds under the Aid to Families with Dependent Children program, and the penalty can go to 3% in the second year and to 5% in the third.

Child-support advocates note that these same penalties are available under the 1984 law--and that the Ronald Reagan Administration passed up numerous opportunities to invoke them. Stanton, who is a political appointee and may be replaced in the Bush Administration, promises to crack down on foot-dragging by the states.

California in Lead

California, a step ahead of the federal government, has enacted its own withholding law. Effective Jan. 1, 1987, all new and modified California support orders make the father’s earnings subject to withholding, although fathers who can show a strong likelihood that they will pay on time can win exemption.

But some counties are lax in enforcing the law, Joanne Schulman, a family law attorney in Oakland, said. “In L.A. County it’s a big problem,” she said.

The Los Angeles County caseload is so heavy that the district attorney’s office, which runs the system, is considering hiring a private contractor for the task, according to Betty Nordwind, a member of a private task force investigating the Los Angeles County system.

“If a mother enters the L.A. system without knowing where the father is, the case is entered into the system without doing anything three-fourths of the time,” Nordwind said. “Their performance, in terms of number of cases open, percent of cases collected and productivity, is substandard.”

Greg Thompson, chief deputy district attorney for Los Angeles County, agreed. He said: “We definitely have a serious child-support enforcement problem. We have over 300,000 active cases, and we’re getting 6,000 new cases a month.”

Collectors May Be Hired

Thompson said the office is experimenting with outside contractors “to try to locate deadbeat fathers and to collect from them.” He characterized these efforts as “pilot projects.”

California is one of three states in which each county runs its own child-support system, and experts say that has served to compound the problems usually faced on a state level.

For instance, the federal Office of Child Support Enforcement is planning to sell each state a computer system to help it manage its child-support operations.

But “in California, where you have such strong and independent counties, every county wants its own system,” Stanton said. “So long as they maintain that attitude, nothing is going to happen in California.”

Although most experts agree that mandatory withholding will make support payments easier to collect, many fathers’ groups say the law is unfair.

Immediate wage withholding “assumes guilt before innocence, constitutes a lack of due process and creates a further imbalance in the system,” David Levy, president of the National Council of Children’s Rights, said. Already, he said, states enforce child-support awards more vigorously than the visiting rights of fathers.

Men’s Rights Position

Dick Woods, executive director of the National Congress for Men, said that the withholding begun under the 1984 law has caused problems, not only for the men but for their employers as well. Small employers have a difficult time keeping up with the bookkeeping, he said, and “many, many men lose their jobs.”

Remarried men are hit particularly hard, he added. “If a (remarried) man’s income drops for a period of time,” he said, “it is logical to think he will spend a little less supporting each household. But with mandatory wage-withholding, the first children get everything.”

Tougher withholding rules is not the only new weapon in the federal law. Two other provisions--increased federal funds for paternity testing and federal enforcement of states’ guidelines for support awards--will have the most immediate effects on the support system, congressional aides said.

Proving the identity of a child’s father through genetic testing is the only legal way that an unmarried woman can be awarded child support. According to the Office of Child Support Enforcement, states establish the father’s identity in an average of 31% of cases involving an unmarried woman and uncertain paternity. In California, the figure was 24% in 1987.

Paternity-Test Aid

The new law mandates that states must establish paternity in 50% of such cases by 1991, and it provides for increased subsidization of paternity tests. In October, 1988, the federal government began paying for 90% of the cost of a paternity test (up from 68% under previous law).

Although there will be no federal guidelines on child-support awards, the new law requires that as of next October, judges must follow guidelines that have been optional in most states. And the states must review their guidelines every four years and adjust them for inflation.

In some states, the guidelines advise judges to award a percentage of the father’s income, according to how many children are left with the mother. Other states use more complicated formulas that include factors such as joint income and the local cost of child-rearing.

Making the guidelines mandatory will make child-support awards “more adequate, more predictable and more consistent,” said Sally Goldfarb, a staff attorney at the NOW Legal Defense and Education Fund in New York. “The new law will give the guidelines more impact and ensures (that) they will be applied in a larger percentage of cases. Most guidelines are an improvement of the traditional award level.”

In California, however, state law already requires judges to follow the so-called Agnos guidelines (for San Francisco Mayor and former Assemblyman Art Agnos), in which support awards are at levels similar to welfare grants. Judges are free to set higher awards based on the Santa Clara guidelines, which use a formula based on the joint, after-tax income of both parents.

“California has low standards,” task force member Nordwind said. “If this occasions a review of the level of child-support guidelines, it may be positive.”