Who Are the Real Deadbeats?

By DAVID G. SAVAGE

March 16, 1997 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

PHOENIX —

Anne McGuigan, a school nurse and mother of two, sits in her sparsely furnished living room and admits that she is not sure which was the bigger mistake in her life: marrying her ex-husband in the first place or turning to the state for help in collecting child support from him.

Despite more than a decade of trying--and a 2-inch notebook of letters, forms and records to prove it--she has failed totally to obtain the court-ordered $250-per-month payment. The misleadingly named Arizona Department of Economic Security was unable to “find” Francis McGuigan for years at a time, even when he was working at a state university campus.

Once found, he managed to delay paying child support for nearly two more years while he demanded new tests to prove his paternity. Once that was confirmed, he disappeared in 1991--for good.

“They have done nothing except run me around,” she says of the state, her anger mixed with a tear. “If I had known what I was going to go through, I would not have even bothered.”

She is not alone. Collecting regular support from absent parents remains a hit-or-miss proposition in this nation, with more misses than hits.

Since 1975, Congress has been funding the states in hopes of creating a national network to collect child support from so-called deadbeat dads. Yet, despite a $2 billion annual federal investment, bipartisan political support and myriad new enforcement laws, the network resembles a sieve.

Nearly everyone agrees that the program had better be fixed soon, before the new welfare law begins to shut off money to mothers with young children at home. In fact, some changes are underway. In California, for instance, drivers with unpaid child support can lose their driver’s licenses.

To be sure, the government program is not the only “machine” for collecting child support and probably not the most efficient one. By common estimates, about half the child support cases in this country are handled informally between separated parents or through private attorneys.

Nationwide, payments are collected in only 18% of cases filed, says the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. According to one national advocacy group, this leaves some 29 million children without the support of one parent.

This is so not just because of bungled collection efforts--as in McGuigan’s case--but also because in many cases, no father has been officially named or no court order has been set requiring regular payments. In Los Angeles County, for example, officials conceded that they do not have the required court orders in nearly two-thirds of their 650,000 child support cases.

In Arizona, the state auditor said its system was “barely functioning” in 1992, obtaining collections in only 3% of the cases.

In frustration, lawyers representing 300,000 custodial parents in Arizona brought a class-action suit against the state. Two months ago, when the Arizona case came before the U.S. Supreme Court, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, an Arizona native, sounded disgusted with the situation. “It has been a dismal performance,” she told a state attorney.

Still, the justices will probably rule that it is up to Congress and the states--not federal judges--to fix the program.

New welfare rules heighten a sense of urgency for critics of the system.

“If they are going to reform welfare without hurting children, they have to make the child support program work,” said Leora Gershenzon of the National Center for Youth Law in San Francisco.

Those most familiar with the federal Child Support Enforcement program voice two sharply different views.

The optimists, including officials who run the program, admit that it has a troubled past but say it is steadily improving. Clinton administration officials point to an increase in collections of nearly 50% nationwide in four years, from $8 billion in 1992 to $11.9 billion in 1996.

Laggards such as Arizona made the best gains. The total amount collected rose 141% in four years. “It’s been a remarkable improvement,” said Linda Blessing, director of Arizona’s Department of Economic Security. New computers, a statewide tracking system and more staffing have brought about the gains, she said.

Arizona auditors agreed that better staffing helps. Now, each state employee in the program is responsible for an average of 1,200 cases--down more than half from the 3,000-to-1 ratio that prevailed before.

“Yes, it’s a real improvement, but a 9% collection rate [in 1995] is nothing to be ecstatic about,” added Bill Thompson, a state auditor.

In California, where the program is handled mostly by county district attorneys, total collections rose to $903 million in 1996, up 38% over the last four years, according to federal figures.

New enforcement tools have kicked in recently. Under new state laws, the Franchise Tax Board has begun collecting on badly overdue accounts--doing things like seizing bank accounts--and the Department of Motor Vehicles is refusing to issue new licenses to drivers with unpaid child support.

Still, the rate of collections remains depressingly low, mostly because of a sharply growing caseload of children born to unmarried mothers. The national collection rate hovers at 18%, while in California money is being collected in only 13% of the cases.

Critics of the program, many of them parents and child advocates, say the system remains a mess: slow, bureaucratic, incompetent and uncaring.

“It’s broken,” said Debbie Kline, director of a national parents’ group based in Toledo, Ohio. The nation’s children are “owed $35 billion in unpaid child support.”

How is it, she and other critics have asked, that a bank in a matter of seconds can debit a credit cardholder’s account for a purchase charged nearly anywhere in the world, yet a government child support agency cannot for years at a time find a missing father and deduct money from his paycheck?

One answer, of course, is that Congress did not create a truly national system that could efficiently track parents and collect money from them. Instead, it left it up to the states to create their own systems. Now, they use different forms, set different rules and, most important, use different computers. California went even further, allowing 58 counties to devise their own programs.

As a result, the program often cannot track a recalcitrant father who moves from Los Angeles to Phoenix, or even from Santa Ana to San Bernardino.

“It would have made more sense to have developed a national system from the beginning,” Kline said.

The gripes are not limited to mothers. Many “noncustodial parents,” nearly all of them fathers, often complain about bungled accounting and unfair policies.

There is “distinct discrimination in the program” against fathers, said Conrad Greene, a divorced father in Scottsdale who sits on a state committee reviewing Arizona’s program. “I pay $475 a month in support to my ex-wife, but she has blocked me even from knowing when my son was going in for surgery so I could be there,” he said.

While the system closely monitors fathers, there’s no similar legal accountability for the mothers, he said. Sometimes, fathers who have paid money directly to ex-wives are told they owe a back debt because the payments were not credited on the agency’s computer.

Sometimes, fathers are not even told that they are fathers--until they get hit with a big bill for overdue support.

“I just heard of a client who has lived in the same house for years, is married and has a family and was told he owes $60,000 in back support for a 17-year-old child that he knew nothing about,” said Ellen Seaborne, an attorney in Flagstaff. And unpaid child support cannot be canceled through bankruptcy.

Not surprisingly, some states are moving to add a time limit on the back debt owed by fathers.

Certainly no government program can make up for a breakdown in the traditional family, whether it is welfare or mandated child support.

The sharp increase in divorce after 1970 was followed by an even steeper rise in out-of-wedlock births. In 1993, 31% of children born in the United States were born to unmarried women.

But the logic of the Child Support Enforcement Program is clear: that the parents--both of them--who create children should be responsible for supporting them. It is “the most sacred obligation,” President Clinton said during his State of the Union speech.

At first, Congress undertook the federal program to collect money from fathers whose children were receiving welfare. The collections mostly reimbursed the government.

But by the early 1980s, the program was opened to all “noncustodial” parents, and Congress set the goal of creating “an efficient machine” to find absent parents, establish paternity, obtain support orders and collect money owed.

Susan Speir, a single mother in Long Beach, urges parents to avoid the Los Angeles County program and instead seek low-cost legal aid to arrange a court order for child support.

Her nonprofit group, known as SPUNK for Single Parents United for Kids, refers parents to other groups who can help them obtain support. But the county district attorney’s office is definitely not one of them.

“It’s hopeless. They will not work your case. They will waste your time, and you’ll get nothing out of it,” Speir said.

Most advocacy groups, however, are still seeking to reform the program, primarily by giving it central direction.

Kline’s national organization, the Assn. for Children for the Enforcement of Support, or ACES, has 35,000 members and has been pushing in Washington for a more uniform federal program.

When the welfare reform bill came before the House last year, Reps. Henry J. Hyde (R-Ill.) and Lynn Woolsey (D-Petaluma) proposed having the Internal Revenue Service take over child support collections, but the idea was blocked by Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.).

Congress is not likely to make any changes this year, aides said, and states are trying to implement those passed last year.

Three major changes are underway.

First, by October, all the states are required to have in place a system that will report the Social Security numbers of all newly hired employees.

“This will give us a database of every new hire in the country,” said Michael Kharfen, a spokesman for the Health and Human Services Department. State and county officials can use the data to check for parents who owe child support. But self-employed people will still be hard to track, he said.

Second, by 1998 all states must have a central office to receive and distribute money withheld from wages. Currently, employers are required to handle the disbursements on their own, and large companies find themselves writing checks to thousands of locations every month.

Third, hospitals are being pushed to enlist in the government’s effort to establish a child’s paternity at birth. “If a father is ever going to show up, it is at the birth, so that’s the best time to establish his paternity,” Kharfen said.

Federal officials hope that these changes, plus pledges of more cooperation between states, will greatly increase collections over the next five years.

McGuigan does not count herself among the optimists. She has heard too many promises that were not fulfilled. In recent years, she also has met with scores of other mothers in the Phoenix area who have had remarkably similar experiences.

“It’s so disillusioning. So many of them are angry” after spending years trying without success to collect the support they are owed, she said. “There’s no question something needs to be done. No one should have to go through this.”

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Dialing for Help

Sources for free or low-cost legal help for single parents:

SPUNK

(Single Parents United ‘N Kids)

Long Beach

(562) 984-2580

Harriett Buhai Center for Family Law

Los Angeles

(213) 298-1441

Tuesday-Friday afternoons

Community Legal Services