When Welfare Ends

		With new welfare limits, child support will take on a much more vital role in shielding children from poverty. Current child support enforcement efforts fall far short of meeting that need.
		Federal welfare reforms require states to make specific improvements in enforcing child support, but how much child support can be counted on to provide for children even with a well-functioning enforcement system remains unknown.
		Getting child support checks to families that can no longer rely on welfare will require innovations beyond traditional enforcement. Those efforts could include establishing paternity early, strengthening ties between non-custodial parents and children, experimenting with child support assurance programs and helping low-income parents become economically capable of contributing support.

When Welfare Ends

Finding 5: The existing child support program is not adequate for providing all of the financial help that children will need when welfare benefits expire.

Welfare reforms are intended to increase financial independence by limiting benefits and encouraging single parents to work. In these cases, child support enforcement will be transformed from reimbursing government for welfare payments to securing essential financial help for families.

While officials believe limits on benefits will increase the cooperation of parents in establishing support orders, they also know that in many cases missing parents cannot be found or have no assets. In fact, the current child support strategy is premised on a seldom-spoken assumption that many absent parents cannot be made financially responsible. In other words, the expectations of welfare reformers are not aligned with the realities of the current child support program.

No one has comprehensively assessed how far the most effective child support program could go toward reducing childhood poverty, what steps would have to be taken to reach that level of effectiveness and what options the State has for helping those families who are not likely to ever receive a child support payment.

Historically, the government could justify large expenditures on child support enforcement because dollars collected from missing parents offset dollars spent on welfare. But as welfare benefits are limited, the economics of the child support investment will have to be reconsidered.

Welfare Reform

The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 fundamentally redefines welfare from an open-ended entitlement to temporary financial assistance. The law affects the child support enforcement program by requiring a number of specific program reforms. But more importantly, the reforms change the program's primary role in welfare-related cases from recovering welfare expenditures to securing long-term private financial stability for single-parent families.

The welfare provisions of the law were controversial in their crafting and are controversial in their implementation. They reduce the amount of benefits paid to families, and impose time limits on how long a family can receive benefits. They also place additional requirements on parents to become employed and they restrict benefits to immigrants.

By comparison, the child support provisions of the new law are a product of consensus and derived through several years of discussions between state and federal policy makers. The requirements impose onto all states the most successful enforcement elements developed in the most innovative state programs -- sidestepping any argument over whether the reforms were possible or likely to be productive. The specific provisions include such requirements as a centralized collections unit, a case registry and a new employee registry. The law redefines the relationship between the federal and state child support offices by creating a performance-based incentive system and expanding the ability to sanction states that do not meet minimum performance standards.

But the essential change to the child support enforcement program is a product of the fundamental change in the welfare program. When welfare is no longer an entitlement, but a benefit that the government grants for a specific amount of time, child support will be recast into a role more central to the financial health of families. In this regard, the law provides the states considerable flexibility to develop an effective strategy -- and as a result creates opportunities to integrate welfare and child support efforts.

Child support enforcement has traditionally had two somewhat divergent missions. The program was created first to recover the cost of welfare payments by tracking down the missing parents of welfare families. Only later did Congress require states to help non-welfare families secure child support with the belief that child support payments prevent poverty. As a result, child support enforcement came to be viewed as affordable insurance against expanding welfare caseloads.

Neither mission came with the requirement or the expectation that the child support enforcement program would be 100 percent successful. In either event, the worst-case scenario was that the family received public assistance. And while that may not be a desirable outcome, it does not compare to destitution.

The divergent missions have created some challenges for federal and state officials, who want support laws enforced in both welfare and non-welfare cases, but not enforced at the expense of the other.

The federal and state incentives are based on a percentage of collections, with program efficiency factored into the equation. That formula would seem to benefit non-welfare cases -- where presumably greater parental cooperation and higher incomes could more easily produce greater collections.

As a result, federal procedures require showings that states and counties are applying similar effort in welfare and non-welfare cases, and the incentives on non-welfare collections have been capped at 115 percent of the collections in welfare cases.

State officials believe these kinds of rules actually work against self- sufficiency on the part of families, because child support programs should be encouraged to secure support in as many cases as they can -- whether or not a balance is struck in welfare or non-welfare cases. In reality, they argue there is little difference economically between the majority of welfare-related child support cases and non-welfare cases. Under welfare reform, the two kinds of cases will have still fewer distinctions, and program strategies and incentives will have to reflect that.⁽¹¹⁴⁾

From the socio-economic perspective, the costs of an ineffective child support enforcement program will increase under welfare reform. In addition to the 1.4 million welfare-related child support cases pending, the State estimates that 80 percent of the non-welfare cases involve families who received welfare before and may need it again. The chief of California's Office of Child Support, testified:

As welfare becomes time-limited, I think it is reasonable to conclude that many welfare recipients will look to the child support program for income support. Child support will be an even more critical part of efforts to reduce dependency and increase self-sufficiency. Right now, there is no meaningful incentive for most custodial parents on welfare to cooperate in any significant way with the child support agency. When one is left without the ability to fall back on welfare (as will occur when time limits expire), child support will become an essential income source for families in addition to work.⁽¹¹⁵⁾

The program response will have to be equivalent. It will mean redoubling efforts to get parents to cooperate in establishing paternity when they apply for assistance -- or before the family reaches the point of needing public assistance.

Redefining Cooperation

The nexus between welfare and child support programs -- and between welfare benefits and a support check -- is parental cooperation. One of the long standing disputes between program officials and advocates is the level of cooperation by welfare mothers in helping to identify missing fathers.

A universal complaint from district attorneys is that welfare applicants -- most often mothers -- do not tell all they know about the father and that welfare officials do little to impress upon these parents the importance of providing detailed information. State officials say that 50 percent of welfare applicants provide authorities only a name to go on -- and often a common name at that. In many of those cases, the DAs say they are given so few clues to the identity or location of the father that the case is dead on arrival at the family support division.

Children's advocates argue that custodial parents are usually cooperative with district attorneys, but that the DAs are slow to follow up on the information. They argue that in those cases that are not welfare related the custodial parents are fully motivated to cooperate with authorities, and in those cases, too, district attorneys are slow to find and bring to court absent parents. They list case after case where the parent -- usually not in a welfare-related case -- delivered detailed information to the family support division, only to wait months or years before the system ground out an order and a wage assignment.

Part of the problem is institutional. Despite the close legal relationship between child support enforcement and welfare, district attorneys and welfare officials seldom see eye to eye. The welfare officials are required to refer cases to the district attorney and the DA is required to work them.

The issue of parental cooperation takes on a new dimension with welfare reform. First, the law increases the burden on parents to cooperate with child support or risk having benefits denied. Secondly, the term limit on benefits is expected to increase the motivation of parents to cooperate in establishing a child support order, so that the child support can provide the family with a source of income when the government benefits expire.

Cracking down on uncooperative parents leads to hard choices. Officials can do that now -- but seldom do. Typically, only 1 percent of those applying for aid are sanctioned for any reason, and half of the time it is for not cooperating with job training.⁽¹¹⁶⁾ The desire to encourage parents to provide detailed information about the father needs to balanced with what the law recognizes as legitimate reasons for not providing the information -- including protecting the family from abusive parents.

The welfare law is intended to make it harder on parents who do not cooperate -- but it does not provide any solutions to states for the decades-old dilemma of how to punish parents for noncooperation without punishing the child.

Under the law, if the applicant does not cooperate with paternity establishment, the state must deduct a minimum of 25 percent from the family's cash grant. States can opt to deny the entire amount of cash assistance to the family. The Wilson administration has proposed denying the entire benefit to uncooperative applicants. It has proposed denying the custodial parent's share of the benefit -- between 10 percent and 39 percent of the benefit, depending upon the size of the family -- until paternity is established.

Whatever the standard that is applied, the mother, child support and welfare officials -- along with a variety of medical, social and educational professionals who work with pregnant single women -- will have to work in greater concert if the mutual goal of helping children is to be achieved.

Paternity

In recent years, the issue of parental cooperation with welfare and child support officials has been superseded by trying to get paternity established even before a family applies for aid.

Persuaded by evidence that fathers are most willing to voluntarily declare their paternity at the time of birth, the federal government has encouraged programs to capture that willingness at the hospital.

Historically paternity was accomplished by suing the alleged father and relying on blood tests to provide evidence in contested cases. Over the years, this process has become easier -- as genetic technology improved to the point that it provided uncontestable evidence of paternity and as the law was reformed to make it harder for alleged fathers to avoid legal proceedings. At the same time the sheer number of cases has grown. For instance, at the end of the 1995-96 fiscal year, DSS reported that 442,000 child support cases in California could not proceed further until paternity is established.⁽¹¹⁷⁾

The federal Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1993 required states to establish in-hospital paternity programs. In California, the Paternity Opportunity Program started in January 1995. The program gives new unmarried parents the opportunity to sign a declaration of paternity in the hospital after the child is born. Although officials say there is not enough comparable data to evaluate the program's effectiveness, through March 1997 nearly 58,500 forms had been submitted with the birth record to the state Office of Vital Statistics.

Some family support directors also said they believed that hospital officials are not assertive enough about getting paternity forms signed. One director said:

Voluntary paternity numbers aren't near what they would be if hospitals were more aggressive. There's no real incentive now. The state and feds should come up with a minimum number of paternities hospitals should establish in a given year and state/federal funding should be withheld if they don't meet that level; or else provide incentive funds with every percentage over a baseline number they achieve.⁽¹¹⁸⁾

Cursory interviews with hospital staff said they were willing to cooperate, but establishing paternities was a low priority in maternity wards. They felt the $10 bounty paid by the State for each form they processed was adequate to cover costs, but was not an inducement to more aggressively obtain signatures from parents.

Congress in 1996 required states to adopt a number of provisions to make it easier for fathers to voluntarily establish paternity -- most of them contained in AB 1832 (Speier) of 1995. Congress also raised the paternity establishment standards that states must reach -- technically to avoid sanctions, although the federal government has not used its sanction authority -- from 75 percent to 90 percent. California's paternity establishment rate in 1995-96 was 39 percent.

The director of the LA family support division said that given the number of out-of-wedlock births, California needed to rethink how and why paternities were established:

This must include finding ways to raise the consciousness of everyone involved in the delivery of social and legal services regarding the critical importance of a father's identity to the future well being of a child. Just as importantly, we must develop a greater consciousness in society at large of the need for securing the child's legal birthright at the earliest opportunity. The economic and other social consequences for the well-being of our youngest citizens will be grim indeed, if we do not succeed in finding ways to forge the legal relationship between generations.⁽¹¹⁹⁾

Some states have managed to establish most paternities long before it becomes an issue with an aid applicant. Massachusetts reports a 70 percent success rate in obtaining voluntary acknowledgment of paternity at the hospital in out-of-wedlock births. Fathers sign a notarized form that includes full disclosure of the benefits and consequences of acknowledging paternity and which carries with it the full force and effect of a judgment of paternity unless rescinded by court order within a specified time period. A state law requiring that fathers sign the acknowledgment in order to appear on the birth certificate provides a strong incentive for acknowledging paternity. Also key to the Massachusetts efforts has been the role of the Office of Vital Statistics, which solicits paternity information along with other public health data it collects from hospitals.⁽¹²⁰⁾

One of the big problems identified nationally is that even if the paternity is established at the hospital, state child support enforcement officials do not know that an affidavit has been signed when the case reaches them a year or two later.

From Paternity to Fatherhood

As researchers have examined welfare reform experiments in recent years, they also have started to more closely analyze the characteristics of fathers who are not living in the home and not paying support. Of particular concern to researchers and policy makers has been the characteristics of low-income parents, for whom no degree of automation or no intensity of enforcement is expected to generate support payments. The policy concerns include the hurdles that prevent these fathers from paying support and whether there are effective strategies that can either make the fathers willing or able to pay support. These policy issues also have been linked with research and writing by sociologists studying the consequences for society of having large numbers of fatherless families and looking for ways to reunite fathers with their children.

The most basic issue is the economic status of non-custodial fathers. One trend documented by the U.S. Census Bureau is that young fathers who may make little money at the time of a child's birth often experience steady increases in income. In 1990, the income of non-custodial fathers who were less than 25 years old was $9,248; the income for those between the ages of 25 to 44 was $19,341; and the income of those older than 44 was $26,166.⁽¹²¹⁾ Another study found that teen-age fathers who live apart from their children had personal incomes that more than doubled between 18 and 26 years of age.⁽¹²²⁾

Some prominent sociologists believe the evidence indicates that more flexible support orders need to be established -- to create a pattern for support that can grow as incomes grow:

Do unwed fathers have the income to pay support? For the population of unwed fathers nationally, I think several studies suggest that they could definitely pay more than they do. And eventually in five or six years they may have more income, so it is important to get the habit established early on. Clearly the group we are concerned about has little income at this point. But there is the possibility that they could at least have token support awarded and begin establishing the habit.⁽¹²³⁾

Researchers also have attempted to gauge the willingness of low-income fathers to make support payments. Studies conducted by the Ford Foundation's Urban Poverty Program, Manpower Demonstration Research Corporation and others have shown that non-custodial fathers in welfare cases are often unwilling to reimburse the government for support but show a greater willingness to help the families directly.

Traditionally, welfare families have received the first $50 paid in child support -- as an inducement to both mothers and fathers to comply with child support enforcement efforts. Anecdotal evidence has discounted the incentive power of the "pass through," because non-custodial parents with a relationship to the family are more likely to provide support under the table. The welfare reform law allows for the $50 "pass through" to be discontinued.

Just as limits on benefits will give custodial parents more reason to cooperate, non-custodial parents may be more willing to pay some level of support once it goes directly to the family.

Similarly, there is a growing body of evidence, and policy interest, in making sure that low-income, non-custodial fathers do not accrue a debt to the government that is so large that it discourages them from supporting their family when welfare benefits expire.

The Department of Social Services has shown interest in suspending support payments as an enticement for unemployed, non-custodial parents to participate in job training.⁽¹²⁴⁾ California law allows judges to require non-custodial parents to participate in job training.

But some states have gone further. South Carolina, for instance, passed a law in 1995 requiring unemployed or underemployed non-custodial parents in welfare cases to perform community service. And the federal welfare law requires states to develop a job training plan for non-custodial parents.

Fathers and Children

Sociologists also have found evidence that after 20 years of increasing distance between fathers and their children, the pendulum is swinging back -- creating the possibility for healthier family relationships and more reliable child support.

In an era without welfare reform, and with large numbers of children growing up in single-parent families, the concern over negative social consequences quickly rises to a level that requires the attention of policy makers:

Child support not only shields children from the harsh effects of poverty, but it also can be a critical factor in maintaining the relationship between non-custodial parents -- usually fathers -- and their children. Fathers who pay support are much more likely to see their children on a regular basis, providing moral, intellectual and emotional support to them, as well as financial assistance. Children's loss of ties with their fathers can lead to emotional disorders, delinquency and crime, adolescent pregnancy and other social ills.⁽¹²⁵⁾

The evidence is growing, for instance, that both divorced and never-married fathers who pay child support are more likely to visit their children and to be involved in the decision making about their children's lives. But it is unclear whether involvement with the children encourages payment or payment encourages the desire to be involved.⁽¹²⁶⁾

Some sociologists say programs need to be carefully tailored to fit the policy goal:

A nascent fatherhood movement could flounder due to disagreements over basic goals. Is the main purpose of such a fatherhood movement to increase child support payments from young, unmarried fathers? If so, the likely strategy will be new paternity identification and child support enforcement programs, including training and other social services. Is the main goal to give divorced fathers more access to their children? If so, the likely strategy will be mandatory parenting classes for divorcing couples plus new laws to encourage joint custody of children after divorce.



Both of theses goals have merit. But neither of them seeks directly to strengthen marriage, the essential foundation for hands-on, effective fatherhood. Accordingly, neither child support payments nor improved divorce procedures can be the animating purpose of a national movement to renew fatherhood. The basic purpose of this movement must be far more radical -- nothing less than reversing the decline of married fatherhood and increasing the proportion of children who grow up with their two married parents. The slogan should be: A father for every child.⁽¹²⁷⁾

Restoring families is much too great of a charge for the child support enforcement program alone. But the size of the caseload and the problems encountered by child support officials need to be recognized as symptoms of larger problems that should be holistically approached. And in that regard, child support enforcement strategies cannot be crafted or implemented in a vacuum. Consider the words of a full-time prosecutor of criminal child support cases:

Especially when dealing with boys growing up in single family homes, I don't use the term 'deadbeat dads' anymore. We're not trying to push dad out of the family. It's OK if he and mom don't get along, but they can still both be responsible parents. Boys who don't have a father in their lives are more apt to get involved with gangs and criminal activity.⁽¹²⁸⁾

Measuring Investment

The Child Support Enforcement Program has been anything but static. As the caseloads have increased and as the numbers of single-parent families have risen, program managers have struggled to keep up -- often without having the resources or the time to assess their progress and revise their strategies.

Welfare reform will increase the pressures on the program to be effective and will require the program to develop new ways to gauge its cost-effectiveness. Program managers will need to measure success so they can repeat it and policy makers will need to measure success so they know how to allocate resources.⁽¹²⁹⁾

For instance, some states have experimented with child support assurance programs, where the State makes up the gap between the support that is actually paid by a non-custodial parent and a minimum level of financial support. The first step toward such a program is assessing that gap and the benefits to the State and the family of filling the gap:

Without child support assurance, even if the private child support system works perfectly, models indicate that 60 percent of the poverty gap and more than half the welfare caseload would remain.⁽¹³⁰⁾

California and others states have proven the value of demonstration projects to provide the funding and flexibility for innovative strategies -- and ultimately the evidence to convince lawmakers to expand those programs that have proven successful. In 1993, the Legislature approved pilot projects in Santa Clara and San Mateo counties, which became the proving grounds for the court commissioner program created by the Legislature in 1996. The Franchise Tax Board's success in collecting delinquent support for six counties paved the way for a service now available to all counties.

Allocating Resources

As difficult as child support enforcement can be, the program has seldom had to fight the budget battles of most public programs. As long as the program was recovering more in welfare money than was spent on enforcement, most program officials enjoyed the envied position of providing a net return to government coffers.

As welfare benefits are reduced, however, so will the easily tallied benefits of child support enforcement. The program may still be cost effective, but officials will have to work harder at proving their case. Not only may they be required to show a net benefit, but individual aspects of the program can be expected to come under increasing scrutiny.

The president of the National Council of State Child Support Enforcement Administrators and director of the Iowa Child Support Enforcement Program explained the dynamic:

Since the beginning of the program, the primary means of calculating cost benefit has been to compare total costs (including that of the $50 pass though) to the public assistance collections obtained. The avoidance of costs related to getting and keeping families off assistance, food stamps, medical assistance, and other income transfer and benefit payments programs have been largely ignored. Avoidance of the costs of social problems related to family and child poverty have also been ignored. To meet this area of concern, we must find a way to measure the full impact of the program in order that taxpayers and policy makers can make reasoned and objective decisions about the resources to allocate to it.⁽¹³¹⁾

Some states, such as Massachusetts, already have demonstrated the larger financial effects child support enforcement can have on government budgets and local economies. Calculating avoided costs has been particularly important in convincing lawmakers that their enforcement efforts are an investment with earnings beyond recouped welfare.⁽¹³²⁾

Summary

Welfare reform changes the expectations for the Child Support Enforcement Program -- not just in welfare-related cases, but for all of families on the edge of poverty that will not have welfare as a backstop in the future. While many welfare reforms have stressed the importance of developing work skills and finding jobs for welfare recipients, others believe that the reforms will shift the dependency of these families from welfare to child support. Even those who find work in many cases will not be able to make enough to meet all of their family needs.

Among other changes, government will have to reconsider its long-standing practice of giving up on difficult-to-solve cases under the rationale that it is not worth the costs involved in finding parents who do not want to be found -- and may not have assets or earnings when they are found.

Recommendation 5: The State must develop and fund new strategies for more effectively collecting child support in cases where families now receive welfare payments. The strategies must include mechanisms for measuring the costs and benefits of child support enforcement efforts so policy makers can make informed decisions about the appropriate level of funding.

There always will be neglectful parents, but the social conditions defining the problem will be constantly changing. Accurate and detailed assessments of different enforcement tools are essential to creating comprehensive strategies for helping children by helping their parents. Specifically, the State should take the following measures:

• Direct the Department of Social Services to prepare, with the assistance of the State's universities, a detailed analysis of how much of the child support caseload can reasonably result in orders under contemporary automation, how much of the child support caseload can never realistically result in a paying order and what are the characteristics of the cases that fall in between.



• Allow for one or more counties to establish pilot projects intended to produce reliable child support in those cases not being reached by current strategies. The potential pilot projects could include a support assurance program in which the government makes up the balance between the support received and a minimum financial benefit, experiments with prenatal paternity establishments and child support orders established at birth.



• Allow for one or more counties to create programs allowing underemployed or unemployed noncustodial parents to work off public child support debts by performing community service or a combination of community service and worker training.



• Commission a detailed cost and benefit analysis of child support enforcement in order to allow for an informed discussion on future funding of those programs. This analysis will be essential to change attitudes and maintain the same political backing for child support efforts as existed when the program's goal was to recover welfare expenditures.