Half of Absent Fathers Pay No Child Support : Welfare: Collections climb, but tracking down triple the current amount from those parents is needed, a government report suggests.

Government-enforced child support payments have climbed sharply in recent years, but about half of all absentee fathers still pay nothing to sustain their offspring, a congressional study showed Thursday.

A doubling or tripling of the current level of payments could be needed to provide adequate support for the growing number of children in single-parent households, according to the report prepared by the Congressional Research Service.

The study said that 23% of all American children in March, 1988, lived in families where the parents had separated, divorced or never married.

Of 7.4 million mother-only families, representing a total of 12.7 million children under 18, nearly half had incomes below the federal poverty line, the study said. About 10% of the mothers worked full-time all year.

Slightly less than half of the children were enrolled in the main U.S. welfare program, Aid to Families with Dependent Children. AFDC recipients are the primary participants in the federal-state program, initiated in 1975 to help obtain child support for single-parent families. The study said that 50% of fathers of AFDC children were not married to their mothers.

Rep. Thomas J. Downey (D-N.Y.), chairman of the House Ways and Means subcommittee on human resources, said that he favors a more “punitive” approach to fathers who refuse to accept financial responsibility for their sons or daughters.

“I think we ought to instill a certain sense of responsibility and fear,” Downey said. “They should know that the federal government is going to find them.” He said that his subcommittee would conduct hearings next year on how to deal with the problem.

Downey said that a welfare reform law will provide new tools this year for increasing court-ordered payments, establishing paternity of children born out of wedlock and automatically withholding court awards from absent fathers’ paychecks.

Although child support collections under the enforcement program jumped to nearly $5 billion last year from less than $3 billion in 1984, Downey said other statistics indicate that only about half of all mothers in single-parent households had obtained a court order for child payments.

A total of 1.7 million parents--virtually all fathers--were located by the program, and paternity was established in 300,000 cases in 1988.

Even for those single parents who got court backing for their claims, the study said, one-fourth never received any money, and another one-fourth got less than they were owed. In 1985, the latest year for which figures on all child support cases were available, only $7.2 billion of the $10.9 billion owed for child support actually was paid.

“Experts have suggested that under reasonable standards, as much as $30 billion per year in child support could be paid by fathers who live away from their children,” Downey said at a news conference.

“Clearly, we have a long way to go, but we are moving toward our goal, he said. “We owe it to the children who have a right to support from their parents and we owe it to the taxpayers who have a right to expect that parents will fulfill their obligations.”