Welfare Plan Cracks Down on Absent Parents

As part of the welfare reform package it plans to unveil next week, the Clinton Administration will propose a nationwide system to track down wayward parents who fail to pay child support and to garnish the wages of those who refuse to contribute voluntarily.

“We’re all paying the price for the thousands and thousands of children growing up without the benefit of both parents,” Bruce Reed, a senior domestic policy adviser to President Clinton and co-chairman of the White House welfare reform working group, said Friday.

If the government were more successful at collecting child support, “we might not have a welfare crisis,” Reed said.

The child-support enforcement measures in the President’s welfare reform package are the toughest ever proposed, Reed said, and will cause many men to think twice before conceiving children out of wedlock.

Child-support enforcement is crucial to their overall plan, officials said, because single-parent families are much less likely to apply for welfare benefits if they are receiving child support and because money collected from absent parents would reduce welfare costs.

A report prepared by the working group shows that the current child-support system fails to collect $34 billion from non-custodial parents. Only 12% of the 6.8 million absent parents whose children received welfare payments in 1992 paid child support, according to Department of Health and Human Services statistics.

Because most fathers visit their newborn children in the hospital even if they are not married to the mother, the plan would require all hospitals to develop in-house procedures for establishing paternity. Paternity establishment is more important now than ever, officials said. As of 1992, 52% of people receiving Aid to Families With Dependent Children had never been married, up from only 21% in 1976.

The initiative would also require employers to report the hiring of all new employees so that states could garnish the wages of deadbeat parents. It would also set up a national clearinghouse to track them across state lines. Drivers and professional licenses would be suspended if parents refuse to pay child support.

With these changes, government child-support collections could be more than doubled from $9 billion in 1993 to $20 billion five years after the program is begun, Administration officials said.

The welfare crackdown is immensely popular politically, as indicated by the huge round of applause the President received when he denounced absent parents who fail to pay child support during his State of the Union Address last January.

“If you’re not providing for your children, we’ll garnish your wages, suspend your license, track you across state lines and, if necessary, make some of you work off what you owe. People who bring children into this world cannot and must not walk away from them,” Clinton said.

The overall welfare reform package is expected to be unveiled as early as Tuesday. A key goal of the plan is to turn welfare into a transitional system by limiting to two years the amount of time most people can collect benefits and by providing job training and placement services and offering child care for recipients who get jobs.

The measure would maintain a safety net by allowing people who cannot find work a chance to continue receiving benefits after the two-year limit by working in a subsidized job. Administration officials expect that about 400,000 people would need such jobs in the fifth year of the program.

The proposal also would attempt to decrease teen-age pregnancy through a national campaign and by requiring teen-age parents to live with their own parents or guardians as a condition of receiving assistance.

Most of the changes, except the child-support component, would apply only to recipients born after 1971.

Most of the elements of the child-support enforcement strategy in the Administration’s plan have been implemented on a smaller scale by some states.

“What the proposal does is take the best of what states have been doing and make sure all the states are doing it,” said Mary Jo Bane, an assistant secretary at the Department of Health and Human Services and a chief designer of the welfare reform plan.

In West Virginia, for instance, the state identified more than half of its unwed fathers last year under a new in-hospital paternity program. Once these fathers are identified, the state theoretically can collect from them.

Paternity establishment becomes more difficult if fathers are not identified soon after their children are born. In South Carolina, for instance, in the first 11 months of 1993, 37% of the 2,840 men identified as fathers by welfare mothers were excluded as possible parents by genetic testing.

Some welfare specialists said that while the proposals could markedly increase child-support collections from absent parents, any improvements in collections from fathers of children on welfare are likely to be slight because many of these fathers work unofficially or are unemployed.

Other welfare experts argued that the overall impact of the proposals will be negligible.

“These are good, solid ideas that no one will quarrel with,” said Doug Besharov, a welfare specialist at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank. “But for none of them is there any evidence that they will make a major change in collections.”

Besharov said it is naive to think that the “hospital gotcha” program will work.

“Once we make it a nationwide practice to catch them there, they’ll stop coming,” he said. “A lot of us are disappointed that this has not been addressed with more candor for the social problems that underlie this problem.”

Some fathers-rights advocates, meanwhile, charged that the efforts would push absent fathers further from their children.

“It treats fathers as cash cows whose only function is to pay money and get lost,” said David Levy, the president of the National Council for Children’s Rights, a group that fights for divorced parents’ rights to be involved with their children.

Child Support Failures

Tracking down wayward fathers is a central element of the Administration plan.

HOW MUCH IS COLLECTED

Child-support payments fall about $34 billion short of what is potentially owed, the Administration says. A study found 10 million American women living with children without the father present.

Of potentially eligible mothers:

Awarded and received full amount: 26%

Awarded support but received less than ordered: 12%

Awarded support but received nothing: 12%

Awarded but not due in year of study: 8%

No support awarded: 42%

PAYMENTS AWARDED AND RECEIVED BY MARITAL STATUS

Whether child support is received varies dramatically by marital status. Never-married mothers collect support far less often than other mothers.

Divorced:

Support awarded: 77%

Support received: 53%

Separated:

Support awarded: 48%

Support received: 31%

Never married:

Support awarded: 24%

Support received: 14%

Sources: U.S. Census Bureau “Current Population Reports,” based on 1989 survey; White House.