Where's Dad?

onsider this: Before federal authorities finally caught up with them, a New York cosmetic surgeon fell $172,000 behind in child support payments; a professional athlete owed $76,000; and a yacht company owner was $50,000 in arrears. While the children went without, one man paid regularly on his $300,000 mortgage, while another bought a luxury car. All three knowingly avoided their support obligations despite obvious abilities to pay.

These men are not exceptions. Every year, about 80 percent of child support responsibilities on record at government agencies go unpaid. While the big-ticket cases get most of the attention, cases involving just a few hundred dollars are equally troubling to children in need. For many custodial parents, most of whom are women, even small amounts of support mean the difference between self-sufficiency and destitution.

Since Congress overhauled the welfare system in 1996, further restricting who's eligible and how long benefits may be drawn, the need to boost child support collection rates has gotten heightened attention. In the process, people have realized that in a realm historically controlled by the states, the federal government has a valuable--indeed a critical--role to play.

During the welfare debates, public assistance became the poster child for devolution. Lawmakers insisted states, not the feds, could best structure aid programs to meet their citizens' needs. They turned a federally guaranteed cash benefit available to all who met the criteria--generally single mothers with children--into a temporary aid-focused block grant that states largely can spend as they see fit.

Congress also recognized, however, that as new welfare time limits kick in, collecting child support will become increasingly important. Former welfare parents working in low-wage jobs will need that money to pay for child care and other necessities. And because a third of all unpaid child support cases are interstate, presenting often insurmountable jurisdictional problems for states ordering the payment, federal involvement is essential.

The welfare changes mandated greater automation of state records so child support data could be fed into new federal databases designed to track people nationwide. Since its launch in October 1997, the federal system has located more than a million people who owe support. In addition, last summer Congress passed a law stiffening the penalties for not paying support, adding two felony categories to the existing misdemeanor charge.

Drawing on these information and legal tools, the Health and Human Services Department has been working with the Justice Department and other federal, state and local authorities to test creative enforcement strategies. They hope to identify and perfect best-practice approaches to bringing deadbeat parents to justice and encouraging others not to fall behind in their payments. The government's message is clear: You can run but you cannot hide.

Program Evolution

States have always had a hard time locating noncustodial parents, especially those who cross state lines. Congress first recognized this in 1975, when it created the federal child support enforcement program within HHS' Administration for Children and Families. The federal role has been to provide policy leadership, technical help and two-thirds of the funding for state programs. States and localities use those resources to work directly with families doing such things as establishing paternity, getting court orders for child support and locating noncustodial parents. In fiscal 1996, operating the program in 50 states and four territories cost $3 billion and yielded $12 billion in support payments.

That amount was a drop in the bucket of what should have been collected. The same year, only 13 percent of the 7.4 million welfare-related cases and only 28 percent of the 9.3 million nonwelfare cases received at least one payment, according to an August 1998 General Accounting Office report. Total collections have risen considerably in recently years. But since the number of cases has been growing at an unprecedented pace, the collection rate has remained flat, notes Geraldine Jensen, president of the Toledo-based Association for Children for Enforcement of Support.

At the heart of the problem are some disturbing social realities. More than half of American marriages now end in divorce and the number of babies born out of wedlock continues to climb. Last year alone, 1.1 million children were born into single-parent homes, says David Gray Ross, commissioner of the HHS Office of Child Support Enforcement.

Compounding the problem is the long-held attitude among some judges and law enforcement professionals that child support is a private, family issue, says Vicki Turetsky, senior staff attorney with the Washington-based Center for Law and Social Policy. Quite frankly, adds a state child support enforcement administrator, "People don't take this seriously enough."

Systemic Problems

Everyone involved is frustrated by the system. To be fair, state administrators do their best with the resources available to them. But many observers believe state legislatures sorely underfund the programs. The average caseload, for example, is more than 1,000. "It's an absurd amount," Turetsky says. "It doesn't allow case workers to touch all their cases, let alone work them."

Given the shortage of resources, it can be a major undertaking for state child support agencies to build cases against deadbeat parents. And when they do, prosecutors often declare they still haven't met the burden-of-proof criteria necessary to bring a case to trial. "If we met all those criteria we could do it ourselves," says one state administrator, adding that state agencies need investigative help from prosecutors. When prosecutors do put time into investigating and gathering evidence, once in court, the judge often dismisses the case, calling it a private matter. "It's very frustrating," says a former state attorney.

The Justice Department has come under heavy criticism over the years for not being more aggressive in prosecuting interstate cases. Some U.S. attorneys offices have reputations as aggressive pursuers of deadbeat parents. But overall, DOJ has prosecuted far too few cases, says Sen. Richard Shelby, R-Ala., who co-authored the 1992 Child Support Recovery Act.

That law made refusing to pay support for a child living in another state a federal misdemeanor. As of March 1998, Justice had filed 560 suits under the law and won 266 convictions. Given that there are millions of cases warranting prosecution, those low numbers are "very disturbing," says Laura Cox, Shelby's press secretary. Justice Department sources say the agency is prosecuting all the cases it can and insist child support enforcement is a top priority for Attorney General Janet Reno.

The Office of Child Support Enforcement's Ross hopes the new felony categories created by last summer's Deadbeat Parents Punishment Act will help attract more resources to the issue. "When the offense was a misdemeanor it didn't rank high on [many people's] list," he admits. "The FBI would get involved when they had time, which meant there weren't a lot of investigations." Instead, investigators, prosecutors and judges have reserved their limited resources primarily for murderers, drug dealers and other serious felons.

If the system frustrates administrators and prosecutors, it infuriates the families that go without support. Mary Tripp has waged a 10-year, on-and-off battle with her ex-husband, who lives in another state and stopped paying child support regularly after their first few years apart. Despite court orders for him to pay up, Tripp says, local authorities in her husband's state have repeatedly failed to force him to pay. Meanwhile, he has taunted her by declaring he was going into business for himself so authorities would have a harder time tracking his income. "Court orders don't seem to mean anything," Tripp says.

Jensen, who says her advocacy group is a product of the failed system, tells a similar story. After years of unsuccessfully working with local authorities to force her ex-husband to pay up and some time spent on welfare, she gave up. Jensen recalls the day a county prosecutor told her there was nothing he could do to force her husband to pay the $12,000 he owed her. "He said, 'If you can do a better job, then go right ahead,'" Jensen recalls. So in 1984 she spent $8 of her last $13 on a newspaper advertisement that read, "Not receiving your child support? Call me." Today her self-help support group has 40,000 members in 48 states.

Computer Age

HHS officials insist the new federal databases created by the welfare reform law will revolutionize child support enforcement. Technically, the databases are expansions of the existing Federal Parent Locator Service, which is operated by the Office of Child Support Enforcement. In the past, states would gather names of deadbeat parents they'd been unable to locate. OCSE staff would then match the information against federal employment, Social Security, tax and other records.

When there was a match, federal authorities would inform state officials who would see that orders to withhold money from a person's paycheck, tax refund or other income sources were put in place.

The trouble was that employment data was only updated quarterly, so by the time someone was located in the computer, that person often already had quit the job. There also was a several-month lag between when a family started its quest for payment and when the checks actually started flowing.

The new National Directory of New Hires gets updated daily. When employers file the W-4 tax information on new employees to state employment agencies, now some of that information--including name, Social Security number, birth date and case identification number--is shared with state child support enforcement agencies. States collect the data in their own new-hire directories for use in locating intrastate parents, and also feed it into the federal directory. By mid-October, the national database held 13 million records.

Complementing the directory is the Federal Case Registry, started Oct. 1, which ultimately is expected to hold records on more than 16 million parents who owe support to about 32 million children. As with the new-hire directory, the federal registry is a compilation of state registries. The Child Support Enforcement Office is renting space on the Social Security Administration's computer system to operate the databases. The big advantage of the new system, Ross says, is that matches can be made overnight, so that families can receive their money faster.

Privacy advocates such as the American Civil Liberties Union have voiced concern about creating new repositories of personal information. Their fear is that, as new systems are added to the massive databases already operated by agencies such as Social Security and the Internal Revenue Service, the nation may ultimately find itself with a de facto national identification system. Such a system, they believe, could easily lead to inappropriate invasions of privacy.

Responding to these concerns, Congress passed legislation last year placing use and time limits on the new-hire directory. HHS may not access wage and unemployment data on individuals who have been up to date with support payments for the previous year. In general, all cases must be deleted two years after entry.

State Struggles

State officials are enthusiastic about the new information tools. "Automation is the key to collecting child support," says Jeffrey Linsker, assistant deputy director for the Ohio Department of Child Support. Indeed, a 1997 GAO review of child support automation efforts found that information systems have improved caseworker productivity and generally streamlined the collection process.

But states haven't had an easy time achieving automation. The feds started encouraging state computerization as far back as 1980, when Congress agreed to reimburse states 90 percent of the costs they incurred adopting new systems. Progress was slow. So in 1988, Congress ordered states to computerize child support records by Oct. 1, 1995, at which time the 90 percent reimbursement was to stop. But only five states met that deadline, according to GAO.

The U.S. Commission on Interstate Child Support, established by the 1988 law to recommend system improvements, described the gravity of the situation in a 1992 report to Congress: "In an era of electronics in which computers have replaced humans in almost every business, the child support program stands as a cumbersome slow-moving dinosaur fed by paper."

After the 1995 deadline passed, Congress gave states two extra years to comply. That time only 12 states made it. Meanwhile, the welfare reform law piled on additional automation requirements--including those for the new-hire directories and case registries--and gave yet another year for compliance. Yet by Oct. 1, the final deadline for states to have their computer systems certified by HHS or risk losing some federal funding, nine states still had unapproved systems despite more than $3 billion having been spent on the nationwide effort since 1981.

"One of the big problems with [achieving full] automation is local fragmentation and an unwillingness to give up autonomy," notes Turetsky. States having the most trouble generally have "a very fragmented, decentralized system, where you have a carriage and 10 horses and all the horses are pulling a different way," Turetsky told the House Ways and Means Subcommittee on Human Resources last January. It's not that these horses don't have the children's best interests at heart, she says, but rather that county officials, district attorneys and other local players often can't find a common vision of what the system should do.

Even among states whose systems have HHS approval, some are missing key components such as the ability to send collected child support payments directly out to families, Jensen says. Others have operational statewide systems, but still don't have all their child support cases entered, she adds. "What good is a federal database that relies on state data if the state data are not there?"

Jensen wants Congress to create a national child support system that piggy backs the federal tax system. One central databank would handle all wage withholding and other payment processing. This way, problems inherent in dealing with 54 different systems could be avoided, she says. The Center for Law and Social Policy also has advocated a federalized system. While it's unlikely Congress will totally centralize child support, lawmakers moved in that direction by creating the new federal databases as a bridge between states, Turetsky says. This bridge "is an alternative to full federalization that should help," she adds. "But whether it will be enough help is unclear."

Enforcement Strategies

Armed in part with this new data, HHS Inspector General June Gibbs Brown has teamed up with the Office of Child Support Enforcement and the Justice Department, as well as state and local authorities, to strengthen enforcement. Their strategy is to leverage resources by targeting the most egregious offenders and publicizing cases in an effort to discourage others from skipping their own payments. Along the way, officials are evaluating the child support enforcement program itself and identifying best-practices for punishing and preventing nonpayment.

Early results from Michigan, Illinois and Ohio, where the multi-agency teams started, have been so good that Justice plans to replicate the model in some form nationwide, according to Allyson Stollenwerck, special assistant to the deputy attorney general and Justice's child support coordinator. "We are working very hard to increase the [prosecution] numbers," she says. "One of the ways to do that is through this task force."

Federal authorities have had jurisdiction over interstate child support cases since Congress passed the misdemeanor law in 1992. For the first few years, the FBI and U.S. attorneys did most of the necessary investigative work. Then in 1995, the HHS inspector general began helping with welfare-related cases.

There's no disputing that the federal presence added muscle that individual states simply couldn't provide. Case in point: "There was a case in Virginia," recalls IG inspector Matthew Kochanski. "A guy told his wife, 'I'm leaving, and you're never going to find me, and I'm not going to pay you a dime.' He runs off and doesn't think he's going to get caught. We found out that he's in Hawaii working as a scuba diving instructor. The last thing he was expecting when he pulled his scuba dive boat into the dock was to see [federal law enforcement officers] waiting for him with handcuffs."

As investigations continued, federal officials noticed pockets of success where aggressive prosecutors had made the issue a priority, says Kochanski, who is coordinating the multi-agency efforts for the IG's office. "But in looking at our numbers--the numbers of convictions and the amount of money brought back--it really didn't amount to a lot in terms of the overall problems out there."

So last year, IG and Child Support Enforcement Office staff started tossing around the idea of an integrated task force that would pool the expertise of Justice, the FBI, U.S. Marshals, the Immigration and Naturalization Service, state and county law enforcement officers, courts, prisons and others. They held symposia around the country early this year to boost awareness that, especially in light of recent welfare reforms, stronger enforcement was needed.

"We brought in more than 200 police chiefs and sheriffs and gave them basic 101s on child support," says Chief Donald Deering of the Office of Child Support Enforcement. "Most of those folks walked away from the meetings with an understanding of welfare reform, the importance of child support and the connection between nonsupport and lack of supervision," which so often leads to juvenile crime, Deering says.

"What we were trying to do is get them to recognize that they had not just a responsibility here but an opportunity to partner with a new group of people that could identify for them a whole at-risk population so they could be more involved in crime prevention as opposed to reaction to crime," Deering adds. "When you think about it, there are probably about 650,000 police officers in this country, maybe 700,000. If we could just capture 10 percent of that resource, we'd more than double the number of people we have in this country working on child support" enforcement.

'Baddest of the Bad'

The task force focus is on high-profile criminal cases. That means cases where arrears exceed $20,000, the money has been owed for at least a year and the parent has the ability to pay, or cases with details so egregious that they warrant special attention. All state administrative and legal remedies must have been exhausted before the task force will take up a case. "These are the baddest of the bad," Deering says. "These are the folks who are very skilled in hiding their assets, staying one step ahead of the bill collector." Investigators rely on IG and Child Support Enforcement staff at a Columbus, Ohio-based central screening unit to highlight cases meeting the high-profile criteria. The screening unit uses the expanded Federal Parent Locator Service and other information tools to locate individuals. Then IG investigators lead the multi-agency charge of gathering evidence--via surveillance, phone monitoring and other techniques--that they later present to U.S. attorneys. Along the way, federal authorities help grease the wheels for state-to-state cooperation on things such as transferring court orders and freezing financial assets.

"We've kind of turned the referral process around," Deering says. Before, state agencies generally referred interstate cases to the U.S. attorney, who referred them to the FBI and other investigators. Now, for these high-profile cases, prosecutors don't enter the picture until the evidence is in hand. The process allows Justice to receive more developed cases, increasing the opportunity for prosecution, Stollenwerck notes. "The more investigative resources we have the better," she says.

Between May and October, the three state teams generated 250 criminal cases, including federal and state, 185 arrests, five convictions, eight guilty pleas and more than $4 million ordered in restitution. State officials say there's been a spillover benefit, too, as voluntary payments rose immediately after well-publicized arrests.

Lynda Crandall, director of the Michigan Family Independent Services Administration, praises the method. The various law enforcement branches that have jurisdiction in child support matters have philosophies that "aren't always in sync," she says, adding that the task force has encouraged different authorities to work more cooperatively. The number of cases targeted is miniscule when compared to total unpaid claims, she admits, but every new enforcement action helps trigger more voluntary compliance.

Jensen agrees with the concept, but is troubled by the high-profile focus. Children whose noncustodial parents are not affluent, making them less likely to fall into the high-profile category, are just as in need, she says. A better method would be tackling various types of cases, Jensen says. "That would send the message that no matter who you are, this is a crime and we will prosecute."

Ultimately, the goal isn't to jail people, but rather to make them pay, notes deputy IG Jack Hartwig. "Certainly we want to motivate the people we arrest and prosecute, but we also want to motivate the people we could arrest and could prosecute," he says. "What we want is people who may be sitting on the fence to realize that there's a tremendous downside to not paying."