Background

		Child support enforcement was developed as a way to keep welfare costs down and children out of poverty in the face of soaring divorce rates and increasing numbers of out-of-wedlock births. Welfare reform will put an even greater burden on child support to combat poverty.
		California ranks near the bottom among states in enforcing child support. The State is counting on a new computer system to solve its problems, but the system is plagued with difficulties and may not be salvageable.
		Because child support programs receive federal funds and recover welfare dollars, the State earns more from the enforcement efforts than it spends. But welfare reform will change that equation. With limits on aid, the savings realized from enforcing child support will be more indirect.

Background

Practitioners of child support enforcement like to say that child support policy is contentious because it involves the two things that people care about most: their children and their money. The axiom understates the issue's volatility. Child support also involves millions of dollars in public money and so many children that the scope and tenor of enforcement efforts reflect the philosophical tenets of broader -- and always controversial -- social policies.

Beyond the political pathos and the social pathologies, enforcing child support laws is difficult for even the most effective people and organizations. The program involves large numbers of people and a diverse population. Some parents demand quick action, some parents feign cooperation and some parents avoid responsibility with criminal intent.

And if child support is the solution, the problem of single-parent families has grown in recent years at an alarming pace. More and more children are growing up in single-parent families, and as a result are vulnerable to poverty and the social cancers that poverty breeds.

This background section describes the demographic trends and recounts the development of child support policies and programs that have been crafted to address those trends. For as long as there have been full-fledged child support programs, there have been efforts to reform those programs. And program reform now has taken on a new urgency as effective child support enforcement is seen by some as the fuel that can get welfare reform off the launch pad.

Of the People

The disintegration of America's ideal two-parent family -- as expressed here by David Blankenhorn, author of the book Fatherless America -- has become a universal lament.

Tonight 40 percent of American children will go to sleep in homes in which their fathers do not live. This historically unprecedented estrangement of adult males from their children and from the mothers of their children is the most harmful social trend of our generation.⁽¹⁾

Stepping aside from the debate over causes and cures, there is wide agreement on the seriousness of the problem and its relationship to the compendium of social maladies: Under the best of circumstances single parents often have difficulty making ends meet. Young, single mothers too often are under-educated and under-employed and as a result they often live in poverty. Poverty puts children at risk of criminal delinquency, drug use, and poor physical and mental development -- and as a result often delivers them to their own adulthood, under-educated and under-employed.⁽²⁾

Not everyone, of course, is pulled into the back alley of destitution. But the chairperson of the U.S. Commission on Interstate Child Support told Congress that financial stresses make one-parent families far more vulnerable to these social ills than two-parent families. For many of these families the best defense against poverty is regular financial help from the other parent:

Single-parent families often face a bleak future. About 30 percent of female-headed households live in poverty. One of the leading causes of that poverty is inadequacy of child support. In fact, three quarters of custodial mothers entitled to child support either lack child support orders or do not receive full payment under such orders. In no other area of financial responsibility does this country tolerate such an abysmal record.⁽³⁾

In the 1993-94 fiscal year, 75 percent of all single-parent families in California received some kind of public aid, including minor assistance such as subsidized school lunches; 62 percent of single-parent families received Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), Supplemental Security Income, Food Stamps or Medi-Cal.⁽⁴⁾ Participation reflects, in part, the fact that some of those programs are aimed at helping single-parent families. But their participation also stems from the reality that single parents are three times more likely to live in poverty than their two-parent peers.⁽⁵⁾

Those statistics also show why federal child support policies were first created to collect reimbursement for welfare expenditures from missing parents, and then expanded to help all single-parent families who need assistance in receiving child support so as to avoid slipping into poverty.

How much difference does a support check make? Single-parent families without orders have a mean annual income of $13,283. Those with support orders who receive all the support due have a mean income of $19,217.⁽⁶⁾

Definitions and Trends

From 1960 to 1990, the composition of American households changed dramatically. The number of married couples with children declined from 44.2 percent to 26.3 percent of the population. The percentage of men and women living alone climbed from 13 percent to 26.6 percent. And the percentage of single-parent families nearly doubled from 4.4 percent to 8.3 percent. That last trend understates the impact on children, because over time more married couples with children have come to include children from previous marriages.⁽⁷⁾

Families traditionally have been defined as mothers, fathers and children. But as tradition changes so does the terminology. In the context of child support, families are defined in terms of custodial parents and non-custodial parents. But they still include children.

• Custodial parents. Nationwide, 86 percent of custodial parents are women. There are 1 million single-mother families in California (8 percent of all households) and there are 220,000 single-father families (2 percent of all households).⁽⁸⁾ About one-half of all custodial fathers are currently married; but only about one-quarter of all custodial mothers are currently married. While 13 percent of custodial fathers live below the poverty line, 35 percent of custodial mothers live below the poverty line. While custodial fathers tend to have somewhat more education, more than half of custodial mothers and fathers have not attended college.⁽⁹⁾




Important distinctions also can be found between custodial mothers who are divorced and those who were never married: 24 percent of the never-married women have support awards, compared to 77 percent of divorced woman.⁽¹⁰⁾ Never-married women also receive far less in support than divorced women -- $1,534 a year on average for never-married women compared to $3,442 a year for divorced women.

• Non-custodial parents. Nationwide, 86 percent of non-custodial parents are men. A 1993 federal study of non-custodial fathers ages 23 to 31, found that 75 percent were single and 25 percent were married. Most reported only one child that they did not live with. The median income of young non-custodial fathers was $15,000, compared to $20,000 for all men of the same age. While some had incomes greater than $40,000, 9 percent had no income and 20 percent of young noncustodial fathers had income below the poverty line.⁽¹¹⁾ A 1993 state survey showed that incarceration accounted for 1.9 percent of the missing parents in welfare cases.⁽¹²⁾
• Children: Between 1960 and 1990, the percentage of children nationwide who were living with only their mother nearly tripled -- from 8 percent to 21.6 percent. Similarly, the percentage of children living with only their father nearly tripled from 1.1 percent to 3.1 percent. In addition, because of divorce and remarriage, 16 percent of children in 1990 were living with one biological parent and one stepparent.⁽¹³⁾ In total, four in 10 children in 1990 were not living with both of their biological parents.

Two trends underlie these changes: divorce and out-of-wedlock births. A third issue imbedded in these trends is often the focus of public concern, teen-age pregnancy. Because single young women are often financially incapable of supporting themselves and their children, they are often central to welfare reform and child support policy debates.

• Divorce. After gradually increasing since 1921, the divorce rate in the United States doubled between 1963 and 1978. While the divorce rate has been flat since then, the U.S. Census Bureau estimates that half of all marriages occurring since 1970 could be expected to end in divorce, with the majority of those divorced persons remarrying.⁽¹⁴⁾ Even a steady divorce rate, however, will yield an increasing number of affected children because of population growth among Californians in their child- bearing years. While divorce remains the primary reason for children living with one parent, out-of-wedlock births is playing a larger role in redefining family.



• Unwed motherhood. The rate of non-marital births has been steadily increasing -- from 1966 to 1993 the rate went from 9 percent to 35 percent of all live births in California. While a large percentage of unwed mothers are teen-agers, non-marital births have been increasing for women of all age groups. For example, between 1966 and 1991, the percentage of non-marital births to women age 15 to 17 grew from 33.6 percent to 76.6 percent; for women age 18 to 19 it grew from 16.7 percent to 62.55; and for women age 20 to 24 it grew from 8.4 percent to 42.3.⁽¹⁵⁾ Similarly, while older and more educated women make up a small percentage of the out-of wedlock births, the rates of non-marital births have increased faster in those categories than among less educated and younger women.



• Teen-age pregnancy. Both nationally and in California, the rates of teen-age pregnancy increased rapidly from a low in 1984 to a high in 1991. California's teen pregnancy rate, however, is higher than the national rate. In 1993, California's teen pregnancy rate was 70.6 births per 1,000 female teen-agers. Nationally, the pregnancy rate was 60 births per 1,000 female teen-agers.⁽¹⁶⁾

Welfare reform -- and in particular the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 (PRWORA) -- was intended to discourage out-of-wedlock births, particularly teen-age motherhood, by reducing available benefits and encouraging public education.

But even if welfare policy reforms help to reduce the birth rate, demographers say that in the near term the numbers of single-parent families will increase significantly. Between 1995 and 2005, the Center for the Continuing Study of the California Economy expects the numbers of single mothers in California to increase by 24 percent, compared to a 2 percent increase nationwide.⁽¹⁷⁾ The large number of women who will be in their child bearing years during the next 10 years will far and away outstrip any reduction in fertility rates.⁽¹⁸⁾

Not all of those families will become clients of a government child support enforcement program. About one half of the child support cases are established as part of divorce settlements that might also include custody and visitation, spousal support and property division. Some of those people will be represented by private attorneys or will represent themselves in court -- but either way the enforcement program is not involved. The other half, however, will either be required to participate in child support programs as a condition of receiving welfare benefits or will exercise an option allowed by federal law to have the government seek to establish or enforce a support order on their behalf.

Public Response and Policies

The public response to these demographic trends has been multi-dimensional -- public assistance, targeted educational and nutritional programs and medical care. During this evolution of public programs, child support enforcement has been transformed from one more section in the Penal Code to an extensive government program.

The fundamental law applies to the rich as well as the poor -- parents must provide for the physical needs of their children. But as government welfare expenditures increased to provide for families where the father was neglecting his obligations, policy makers began to rethink the role of child support. As more children were born out of wedlock, establishing legal paternity became a large component of securing support. And as the sheer number of cases increased, automation has been relied upon to track down parents and collect support. As welfare programs are redefined to encourage financial independence, the role of child support and the strategies involved will have to change, as well.

From Crime to Cure

First and foremost, failing to care for one's children is a crime. In 1872, the Legislature passed its first law affirming the State's interest in ensuring that parents live up to the most fundamental of obligations:

Every parent of any child who willfully omits, without lawful excuse, to furnish necessary food, clothing, shelter or medical assistance for such child, is guilty of a misdemeanor.⁽¹⁹⁾

The criminal statute has been revised periodically: A 1909 amendment made the offense punishable by up to two years in state prison, a $1,000 fine or both. A 1915 amendment made it clear the law applied to "either a legitimate or illegitimate minor child." A 1957 amendment reduced the maximum imprisonment to one year in jail. And a 1983 amendment made the maximum fine $2,000.⁽²⁰⁾

The criminal sanction was the pillar of child support until the contemporary welfare program arrived and child support enforcement became an adjunct of the social program. The federal welfare program was initiated in the 1930s as a widow and orphan relief fund -- cases that were few in number and in which single parents were expected to stay home and care for their children.⁽²¹⁾

In the 1950s, the program was expanded to include children of fathers who were alive, and the caseload began to grow. (Today, 85 percent of the cases involving AFDC in California involve families with a missing parent, in nearly all cases the father. The rest of the aid goes to families with unemployed or incapacitated parents.)⁽²²⁾

In 1950 Congress passed its first child support enforcement law, requiring state welfare agencies to notify law enforcement officials when giving aid to a family abandoned by a parent.⁽²³⁾ The Legislature responded in 1951 by making county welfare departments and district attorneys responsible for child support. The statute required welfare officials to immediately notify district attorneys of absent parents and district attorneys were required to investigate those cases. The historical context of that decision was recounted in 1971 by the state Social Welfare Board:

This statute was enacted because the public had become concerned about welfare costs, and little was being done about securing contributions from absent parents. As welfare departments were considered to be largely responsible for the failure and it was thought district attorneys would take a different view, the entire responsibility was shifted to district attorneys. No discretion was left to welfare departments.⁽²⁴⁾

The caseload began to grow even faster as single-parent families became more common. Between 1970 and 1980 alone, the number of families headed by women doubled and the number of children with never-married mothers tripled.⁽²⁵⁾

These dramatic trends provided grounds for political compromise between conservative policy makers who wanted to increase child support enforcement and reduce welfare payments and liberal policy makers who backed stronger child support programs as a way to defend the welfare program.⁽²⁶⁾

In 1974, Congress created Title IV, Part D of the Social Security Act (PL 93-647). The amendment created a federal child support enforcement program -- often known as the IV-D program -- and delegated to the states the day-to-day responsibility for tracking down absent parents, establishing a legal order of support and enforcing that order. To qualify for federal welfare money, states were required to implement child support programs to federal standards, and in turn the federal government agreed to pay for two-thirds of the child support program costs.⁽²⁷⁾

Division of Labor

Implementation of the program varied from state to state. Most states -- 32 -- have centralized programs operated by the state agency responsible for the welfare program. More recently a number of states -- including Massachusetts and Arkansas -- have transferred the program to the state tax collection agency. In Texas, the child support program is the responsibility of the Attorney General.

In California, the child support enforcement program is in the Department of Social Services (DSS) and the day-to-day responsibilities have been delegated to the district attorneys in the 58 counties. Within the DA offices, child support operations are assigned to family support divisions (FSDs) -- which often employ more people than the prosecutorial divisions, though only a few of the workers are attorneys. Eight other states -- some with large and some with small caseloads -- have county-run systems: Alabama, Colorado, Minnesota, New Hampshire, New York, North Dakota, Ohio and Pennsylvania.

A third major partner in the child support enforcement program is the judiciary. California and 32 other states rely on the courts to establish paternity and support orders. From the judicial perspective, child support is part of the complex and cumbersome area of family law -- intertwined with issues of divorce, property settlements, custody and visitation.

In addition, a number of other state agencies in California have been enlisted to lend their expertise to finding missing parents and their assets. Among them:

• Attorney General. The Department of Justice operates the Parent Locator Service, which matches names with social security numbers, criminal records and other databases that help to find missing parents. The Attorney General also represents counties and the State in legal cases involving child support.

• Employment Development Department. The department collects information from employers to help track down missing parents and to assign wages. It also intercepts a portion of workers compensation and unemployment payments that would otherwise go to non-custodial parents who are delinquent on child support payments.

• Franchise Tax Board. The board operates a voluntary service for counties in which it uses its records to help find missing parents, and its authority to administratively issue bank liens and assign wages to collect past-due support.



• Department of Consumer Affairs. The department's professional licensing boards revoke business licenses of parents who are delinquent on child support payments.

• Department of Motor Vehicles. The department revokes the drivers' licenses of parents who are delinquent on child support.

Many of these agencies have become involved because they possess or have access to computer databases needed to locate parents or assets. The counties rely on searches of those databases daily, weekly, monthly and quarterly -- depending upon how frequently they are updated. Some counties have gone beyond the information provided by these agencies to tap into Department of Defense records, credit reports and other databases that might provide that solid clue that leads to a support order.

The information, however, is only as useful as it is current, accurate and complete. The relationships among these agencies are not always good, and most importantly, the relationship between county district attorneys and state welfare officials can be tense. District attorneys are locally elected and largely independent political entities -- with links to county supervisors for funding issues and with the Attorney General for legal issues. While the district attorneys are "partners" with state welfare officials in the child support program, the cultural differences between criminal prosecutors and social workers are a persistent source of unease.

At the county level, district attorneys frequently complain that county welfare officials do not aggressively seek information from welfare applicants about the identity and location of the missing parent. County welfare officials traditionally have been more interested in protecting mothers from neglectful or even abusive fathers and view child support enforcement as a program that reimburses the government for welfare expenses more than providing a benefit to families.

Funding

The federal government pays most of the bills associated with child support enforcement. Those expenditures are justified in large measure because they help to recover money spent on welfare or are viewed as an investment in keeping economically marginal families off the welfare roles. According to DSS:

Taken as a whole, the program generates a total net return on investment to all levels of government of about 15 percent, plus substantial welfare savings due to cost avoidance, making it an attractive business proposition for taxpayers.⁽²⁸⁾

The revenue stream flows like this: When parents apply for welfare, they sign over to the government their right to child support as long as they are receiving benefits. In those cases, the government pursues the child support from the missing parent to recover the expenses of welfare. So while support collected in non-welfare cases is passed on to those families, support collected in welfare cases is distributed among the government agencies in the same ratios as they contribute to the welfare benefit: 50 percent to the federal government, 47.5 percent to the State and 2.5 percent to the counties.

In addition, the federal government reimburses states (and in California, the counties) for 66 percent of the costs of enforcing child support. For some parts of the program, including automation and paternity-related laboratory costs, the federal government reimburses 90 percent of the costs. The federal government also pays incentives to the states based on how much child support the programs collect. The incentive is calculated by dividing collections by total administrative costs in an effort to reward states that are more efficient.⁽²⁹⁾

Between the reimbursement for administrative costs and the incentive payments, the federal government pays for 83 percent of the total program costs in California.⁽³⁰⁾ The recouped welfare and costs avoided by keeping some families off welfare put the program over the top -- and as a result child support contributes more money to the state General Fund than it receives.

The Department of Finance estimates that in fiscal year 1997-98 the State and the counties will spend an estimated $489 million on child support enforcement. Of that, the federal government will reimburse an estimated $323 million. The State's share of the unreimbursed costs come to $18 million and the county's share of the unreimbursed costs come to $148 million.

In addition to the reimbursement, the State is expected to recover $234 million from child support collected in welfare-related cases. The counties are expected to recover $31 million in welfare-related child support.

Between federal reimbursements, state and federal incentives and recouped welfare, most counties will recover all of their costs. Counties that for whatever reason do not run in the black often have problems securing the additional funding needed to make the improvements that could lead to greater collections and efficiencies. At the opposite extreme, some of the most efficient counties are discouraged from spending more money and increasing efficiencies even more because most of the additional revenue would go to the State rather than the counties.⁽³¹⁾ The Legislative Analyst has argued that if counties received additional funding based on their degree of efficiency, they would likely invest more money into the program and child support collections would increase.⁽³²⁾ The department has been reluctant to propose changes that would reduce the child support program's contribution to the General Fund.⁽³³⁾

Federal Reforms

Since the federal child support program was established, a number of major attempts have been made to bolster its effectiveness, largely drawing on the experience gained in innovative states. The latest such effort is the federal welfare reform bill, which seeks to transition families off welfare either into the workforce or onto child support. While the federal government has attempted to make nearly continuous improvement in the program, large reform efforts were made in 1984, 1988 and 1992.

• 1984 Child Support Enforcement Amendments. Responding to analyses that found non-custodial parents were defaulting to the tune of $4 billion a year, Congress mandated that states take a number of actions. The amendments required states to adopt expedited procedures for establishing support orders, mandatory income withholding rules for delinquent parents and tax refund intercepts. The federal incentive and audit programs were revised to include penalties for noncompliance. States were required to offer services to non-welfare families and to develop guidelines for setting support levels.⁽³⁴⁾

• 1988 Family Support Act. The law required universal wage withholding in all cases and mandated use of guidelines for determining support awards. It required States to meet federal standards for paternity establishment. It mandated statewide automated tracking of cases by October 1995, which in California is the troubled Statewide Automated Child Support System. It required the collection of performance data.⁽³⁵⁾

• 1992 Child Support Recovery Act. The act created a federal criminal penalty for willful failure to pay past-due support to a child residing in another state.⁽³⁶⁾

Other efforts have been made to reduce the barriers to collecting support in interstate cases. The National Conference of Commissioners on Uniform State Laws approved the Uniform Reciprocal Enforcement of Support Act in 1950, and amended it in 1952, 1958 and 1968. Some states, including California, adopted the standards, but several others did not and some did not amend their laws to remain current -- negating the benefits of uniformity. In 1992, the Uniform State Law Commissionapproved the Uniform Interstate Family Support Act, and the welfare reform law of 1996 requires states to adopt the rules for handling interstate cases.⁽³⁷⁾

State Reforms

With each change in federal law, California's program has been modified to bring it into conformance. California also has attempted to initiate its own reforms. In 1992, the Department of Social Services crafted a "business plan" for improving the Child Support Enforcement Program. The document, which was called Vision for Excellence, blamed California's poor performance on the "lack of an overall vision" for developing the program, and the lack of a strategy for investing in improvements that would increase child support collections.⁽³⁸⁾ The chief of the Office of Child Support asserts that most of the steps outlined in the plan have been taken. And while the department reports gains in the numbers of paternities and orders established, the department did not reach the goal it set to reach by 1997: for collections to reach $1.5 billion.⁽³⁹⁾ Collections in 1996-97 are expected to be $1.1 billion.⁽⁴⁰⁾

In 1995, a Governor's Child Support Court Task Force reviewed the judicial procedures associated with establishing paternity, support orders and subsequent enforcement. The group's intent was to find ways to help the courts handle the large volume of cases while at the same time making the process more understandable to parents.⁽⁴¹⁾

The task force recommended uniform methods for handling welfare-related cases, simplified procedures, and information and assistance centers for parents. Dissenting members of the task force argued the recommendations should have gone further by backing an administrative process to replace the court process. A majority of the task force, however, believed that an administrative process would only create new problems -- by providing yet another forum for confused parents to deal with, by splitting welfare-related child support cases away from other family law issues such as divorce and custody, and by relegating welfare-related child support cases to a "second class" adjudication system.⁽⁴²⁾

The court task force recommendations were implemented in AB 1058 (Speier), which was signed in 1996. Under the plan, requests to establish paternity and to establish, modify and enforce child support orders must be referred to a child support commissioner for a hearing. The law requires that each superior court maintain an Office of the Family Law Facilitator, staffed by a licensed attorney with mediation or litigation experience in family law.⁽⁴³⁾

In addition to implementing the court task force recommendations, the Legislature has passed considerable legislation in recent years. Some of the legislation was intended to lower the hurdles to establishing orders -- such as provisions for voluntary paternity establishment. But most of the legislation has provided authorities with more tools for enforcing orders once they are established.

The Legislature created the new-hire registry, which matches new employees in selected industries to lists of missing parents, and the Franchise Tax Board's delinquent collections program. It created the drivers' and professional licensing revocation programs, and required lottery winnings to be diverted to pay off child support debt. Even the critics of the system agree that once a non-custodial parent has been located and an order has been established, California has the best set of enforcement tools in the nation.⁽⁴⁴⁾

Welfare Reform

The 1996 federal welfare reform bill transforms the federal AFDC program into a lump-sum or block grant program called Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF). The law prohibits states from using the block grants to provide assistance to families who have received benefits for five years. States, however, may exempt up to 20 percent of their caseload from the five-year limit.

The law impacts child support in two fundamental ways: First -- and in the long run most important -- the reforms reduce the program's role in recovering welfare and increase its role in helping families escape poverty. Secondly, California must implement specific program reforms to conform with federal mandates. While many of the new rules are already in place, California will have to take the following measures:

• Expand the new-hire registry. The State has a registry of new employees hired in specific industries that provide district attorneys with information on missing parents. But only a small group of employers are required to participate. The law will require all employers to report and in a shorter time frame than under current law. This requirement is described in more detail in Finding 1.

• Improved data collection and reporting requirements. California will need to comply with new federal data collection requirements and annually conduct audits on performance data. This requirement is described in more detail in Finding 2.

• Create a centralized collections unit. Currently the 58 counties collect child support, process the receipts and issue checks to families. The federal law requires that a centralized collection and disbursement unit be created, unless the state can prove that linked local units are cheaper to establish and operate. Employers must have one location to send all wage assignments. This requirement is described in greater detail in Finding 3.

• Create a central case registry. California law already calls for a central location for information on cases, but the law has not been implemented. The Statewide Automated Child Support System (SACSS) will not provide this function. This requirement is described in more detail in Finding 4.

• Expand work requirements for non-custodial parents. California already has a law requiring unemployed non-custodial parents who are behind in child support to look for work, but the State may have to expand these programs to provide for young fathers to perform community work or parenting. This requirement is described in more detail in Finding 5.

While child support is playing a larger role in social policy as a result of welfare reform, it could also come under closer fiscal scrutiny. Over the past 20 years, the federal and county governments have been able to offset expenses by recovering money doled out to welfare recipients. This will not be as true in the future. If a family is terminated from benefits, money spent trying to enact a child support order will be, in a sense, a new expenditure. There will still be benefits to public coffers. But increasingly those benefits will be indirect or down the line -- money that is not spent on criminal justice, for instance, because child support payments allowed for some single-parents to provide healthier environments for their children. Calculating these benefits so that policy makers can make the best appropriations will be a difficult task.

Searching for Fairness

In establishing a child support order, a judge must decide how much the absent parent should pay. Historically, the amount was a product of judicial discretion. But children's advocates complained that some judges did not set awards high enough to pay for the basic needs of children, while some parents complained about the wide disparity from state to state, county to county and even judge to judge.

In the 1980s, some California counties began to develop guidelines to make orders more equitable and predictable. Eventually federal statutes required states to have guidelines. The guidelines, however, have not resolved the disputes, merely altered them.

From the parent's perspectives, two aspects of the guidelines are controversial: The amount of support they dictate and how visitation and custody influences the level of the award.

The current guidelines, which were adopted in 1992, include an algebraic formula. Judges rely on computer programs to do the computation, which factors in the number of children in the family, the time spent with each parent and the parents' earnings. Central to the bottom line is the variable that reflects percentage of income based on different earning levels. The variable is known as the K factor.

In 1991, the California Judicial Council established a guideline that created three tiers for the K factor -- 0.26 percent for parents making up to $1,667 a month; 0.20 percent for parents making $1,668 to $4,999 a month and 0.16 percent for parents making between $5,000 and $10,000 a month.⁽⁴⁵⁾ Under SB 370, the K factor in the current guidelines was raised from 0.20 percent to 0.25 percent for the middle tier and the middle tier was expanded to include parents making between $801 and $6,666 a month. SB 370 also raised the multiplier for 2 children from 1.5 to 1.6.⁽⁴⁶⁾

The Judicial Council guidelines were controversial, and the SB 370 guidelines have been more controversial. Virtually every year since they were established, legislation has been introduced to raise or lower support levels. The central policy issue underlying the K factor is whether child support awards should provide custodial parents with a minimal amount of money needed to raise that child, or whether the award should attempt to provide children with the financial resources they would enjoy if the family were intact.

Judges have two concerns with the guidelines -- their complexity and their rigidity. The presiding judge of the family law division of the Sacramento County Superior Court testified that the complexity leads to delay -- raising legal costs, delaying support orders, and increasing stress on children. The judge said: "The more variables the Legislature allows in the computation of child support, the more areas of dispute are created." The judge advocated a simple schedule that did not require the judge to make a series of determinations in contested cases.⁽⁴⁷⁾

An associate justice from the First District Court of Appeals testified that the inflexibility of the guidelines can produce "absurd" results and can unintentionally lower the amount of support paid. In one court opinion, the justice digressed from the facts of the case to point out what he believes is legislated injustice:

The Legislature has adopted a detailed and relatively inflexible child support statutory scheme much akin to the Internal Revenue Code that lumps all California parents together and treats all the same, failing to recognize the differences in circumstances which occur from case to case. There may be good reason to have hard and fast rules and eliminate discretion in applying tax laws, since there seems to be little concern about tax laws causing inequities. However, it is unwise to adopt harsh, inflexible rules for child support, which will inevitably cause hardship and inequity.⁽⁴⁸⁾

Part of the dilemma is that the guidelines have been changed so much and so often, there has not been any data to determine exactly how the guidelines influence family income. In the absence of data, the political debate of the last two years has been defined by anecdotal horror stories. The California Judicial Council is required to periodically review the guidelines and recommend changes. The council -- chaired by the Chief Justice of the California Supreme Court and made up of judges, attorneys, legislators and public members -- is conducting a study expected to provide both qualitative and quantitative information on the current guidelines.⁽⁴⁹⁾ The Council is expected to release its latest assessment in December 1997.

Specifically, the Council's review is attempting to determine whether the guidelines are equitable to both parents and the effects of support orders on second families. The Council also is analyzing the collection rates for different income levels and reviewing how the guidelines influence parent-child visitation.⁽⁵⁰⁾

The Council also will look at the effect of the guidelines on different income groups. While middle- and upper-income parents have complained loudly about the current guidelines, children's advocates have argued that an additional increase is essential if child support is to keep families from sinking into poverty. Further if, as a result of welfare reform, child support is going to be a primary defense against poverty, the guidelines will take on additional weight.

The evolution of the guidelines reflects the evolution of child support itself, from something that judges and law enforcement officials occasionally dealt with into an issue that has filled dockets and requires full-scale bureaucracies.

The guidelines controversy also reflects the difficulty of trying to set good policy without good information. The Little Hoover Commission, while urged by competing public advocacy groups to recommend raising and lowering the guidelines, believes it is inappropriate to modify the recommendations prior to the conclusion of the Judicial Council's review.

California's Performance: Controversial at Best

California's child support enforcement record -- although obscured by needless uncertainty, as described in Finding 2 -- appears to be far below a national average that no one defends as good enough.

According to the National Center for Youth Law, a harsh critic of California's child support enforcement program, the State ranks near the bottom of nearly every measure used nationally to compare performance:

Nationwide support is collected for less than 20 percent of children. In California where more than one in four children live in poverty, support is collected for less than 13 percent of children. This means that last year over 3.1 million children failed to receive any support from their noncustodial parents and from California's child support program.⁽⁵¹⁾

A 1996 review of child support programs by Children Now, a children's research and advocacy group, said California's performance -- along with the nation's -- was "trending worse." Among the measures it relied upon was the percentage of cases in which support was actually collected. California's performance, according to the group, has slid from 19.5 percent of cases in 1991 to 12.9 percent of cases in 1994. By that measure, California ranked 47th among 54 states and territories.⁽⁵²⁾

In the most recent national review of state performance prepared by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, California also ranked 47th overall based on seven criteria. Of the seven criteria, California ranked highest in paternity establishment -- 13th among the states and territories. But in five of the categories -- including parents located, cases with orders and cases with collections, collections per case and cost effectiveness -- California ranked 40th or lower.⁽⁵³⁾

The California Family Support Council and the California District Attorneys Association maintain that comparisons across states are inaccurate for a litany of reasons: because states keep statistics differently; because some states manage all child support cases, not just welfare-related cases or those cases where parents seek the government's help; because different states have different welfare benefits, influencing recoupment rates.⁽⁵⁴⁾ But even when analysts modify the scales to reflect those inequities, California's performance is still below average.

The statistics also show wide disparity from county to county. When looking at revenue collected in ratio to administrative costs, Madera and San Diego counties top the list, each collecting more than $2 for every dollar spent. Alameda and Fresno Counties are also high on the list. Ten counties collect less than a dollar for every dollar spent: Alpine, Trinity, Modoc, Butte, San Benito, Inyo, Marin, Colusa, Yuba and Los Angeles.⁽⁵⁵⁾

California also performs poorly in statistical analysis conducted by academic researchers. A study published in 1996 by researchers from Princeton and Columbia universities found that in the early 1990s, the national average was for states to collect about 18 percent of the child support that they might have collected under an ideal system. By that measure, the collections ratios in four states -- Indiana, Massachusetts, North Carolina and Ohio -- were substantially above average. In contrast, collections ratios were substantially below average in Washington, D.C., Maryland and California.⁽⁵⁶⁾

Even after making an adjustment to compensate for the additional challenges presented by large urban populations, Maryland and California ranked below average. And when compared over time, in an attempt to see which states were responding to federal child support reforms, California again ranked at the bottom, and its effectiveness had actually declined slightly.

The analysis attributed California's poor statistical performance to the State's below average award levels in the early 1980s. This factor should have been corrected somewhat by changes in the guidelines in the early 1990s. But the report also concluded that in 1987 California was one of only nine states that had not implemented all of the 1984 federal child support reforms. Researchers concluded: "The case of California may simply be one in which a mediocre child support system became overwhelmed by the nationwide flood of new cases."⁽⁵⁷⁾

The Department of Social Services maintains that many of the program's problems will be resolved when the Statewide Automated Child Support System is on line -- delivering the benefits of uniform procedures among the counties and the benefits of automation to individual counties.

Spawned by a 1988 federal mandate, SACSS is intended to be a massive computer network linking counties and the State together. In California -- where parents often move from county to county and where each county runs its own child support program -- such a linked system is crucial. It would consolidate data and enable caseworkers to coordinate efforts with other counties instead of duplicating activities and sometimes working at cross purposes. It also is needed to allow counties that are still working individual cases by hand to rely more on computers to perform routine tasks.

SACSS, however, has been plagued by problems and cost overruns for nearly four years. With $82 million spent, time running out before an October 1997 federal implementation deadline, and only 23 of 58 counties connected to the system, the State has frozen implementation while debilitating software problems are resolved. The State hired a consultant to determine whether SACSS can be salvaged. The verdict: maybe -- but only if 1,400 technical problems can be resolved.⁽⁵⁸⁾

Previously automated counties that are using SACSS complain that procedures that once took minutes take hours with SACSS. As of April 1997, none of the links with automated databases were working, nor was the system doing its job of automatically producing forms to speed the enforcement process. Users protest that SACSS is overly complex -- it has almost 400 different screens -- and unforgiving, with frequent system crashes.

Summary

Minus the complications of SACSS and the challenges of welfare reform, California's job of making nearly 2.4 million non-custodial parents financially responsible for their children would be a daunting task. Significant efforts have been made in recent years to improve the child support enforcement program. But while program officials assert that progress is being made, researchers and advocates argue California is still performing below average. Without even agreement on the state of affairs, it is difficult for policy makers to assess shortcomings and fashion solutions.

And unfortunately, it is no longer enough for California's enforcement program to strive for a level of effectiveness that other states reached five years ago. The social landscape is changing again, and now California's program will have to be more fundamentally reformed -- to meet federal requirements, to meet changing public expectations and to play a larger role in protecting children from poverty.