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Dealing with deadbeats

By LISA MARTIN
Special to the Daily Transcript

June 28, 1999

There is a critical need for effective child-support enforcement as parents fail to meet their obligations and millions of California children suffer. And taxpayers are left holding the bag for a broken system.

This negligence of non-custodial "deadbeat" parents has forced many custodial parents to seek state assistance for their families at the expense of taxpayers. Not only must taxpayers fund the increase in demand for social services, taxpayers also must fund the child-support enforcement and collection efforts.

Obviously, ineffectiveness of this program is a major blow to taxpayers, as well as business, families, educators and all Californians who have a stake in providing children the resources they need to survive.

Statistics associated with this problem are staggering. To date, about $8.5 billion is owed to nearly 4.5 million California children. Only $1.4 billion, however, was collected in 1997-98. This collection rate forces many children to survive on welfare benefits and causes an unnecessarily increased social safety-net cost for California taxpayers.

Other problems include:

  • Nearly 65 percent of children on welfare are owed child support, and five of six of these children are not receiving any child support at all. In California's largest county (Los Angeles County), only 10,000 of 400,000 current collections are made for single parents on welfare.

  • Many county management information systems are not established to adequately track parents to collect delinquent funds, or, even worse, to transfer collected funds to recipient children. For example, in Los Angeles County, millions of collected dollars were not distributed because recipients could not be located.

    Seeking solutions, performance in child support enforcement service can be improved by the following taxpayer-friendly actions:

  • Facilitate policy changes and state-level assistance that enable counties to form better partnerships with the state and yield-improved outcomes with child-support enforcement.

  • Before reinventing the wheel, allow for competitive-service delivery, utilizing highly experienced, state-of-the-art private companies to perform specialized child-support enforcement services.

  • Examine successful child-support enforcement models, including competitive-service delivery, in other states.

    Two examples of innovation prove that, with flexibility and partnering with experts in the field, efficiencies can be achieved.

    In Illinois, Cook County has partnered with an outside organization to perform review and modification of support orders, as well as income withholding for those who fail to pay their child support. This partnership has streamlined Cook County's child-support enforcement process and significantly improved its collection rates.

    Montana has partnered with a private entity to perform the state's customer service function, allowing Montana's child-support staff to devote more time to increasing collections. The private entity provides the key education function, interviews custodial parents to support paternity establishment and verifies the identity of non-custodial parents.

    So far this year, the California Legislature has made progress toward reforming the system, and it should be encouraged to thoroughly consider innovative approaches to child-support enforcement problems. The Senate has approved SB 542, authored by Senate President Pro Tem John Burton. As summer arrived, this measure was pending in the Assembly. Meanwhile, Assemblymember Sheila James Kuehl's AB 196 cleared the Assembly and was pending in the Senate.

    The Burton measure would create a state Department of Child Support, consolidate efforts and seek accountability. The Kuehl bill would require the governor to appoint an undersecretary for child support to manage the program and come up with uniform standards and procedures. Both bills would take child support enforcement away from district attorneys in the state's 58 counties -- a primary reason the current system that has not done the job.

    It is anticipated that the Burton and Kuehl measures will result in a Senate-Assembly conference committee to hammer out a compromise before the Legislature quits for the year in September.

    Taxpayers should take a keen interest in the outcome.

    Lisa Martin is a policy analyst for the California Taxpayers' Association.

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