Cutting to the chase on the deadbeats' trail - parents who are delinquent in meeting child support payments

0 Comments | Insight on the News, April 26, 1993 | by Susan Moran

The role of the IRS seems likely to grow. A bill before Congress sponsored by Republican Rep. Henry Hyde of Illinois (who drafted legislation in 1992 that makes interstate flight to avoid support payments a felony) would make the IRS, rather than state agencies, the primary collector of delinquent support payments. The new IRS role would be phased in, Reed says, because the agency "is not in a position to inherit the whole system overnight."

Democratic Rep. Robert Matsui of California, a member of the House Ways and Means Committee and acting chairman of the Subcommittee on Human Resources, says, "We believe that the IRS can play an important role in this process, and the administration is working very hard to come up with a good plan."

The White House, too, wants to play a role in restructuring the system. Clinton has called for a national deadbeat-parent data base, which would allow employers to determine whether prospective employees are liable for child support. A national tracking system would make it easier for law enforcement authorities to find the worst offenders.

"Child support too often is viewed as a welfare problem and not as a law enforcement problem," says Reed. "The states that have been most effective in improving their collection rates have been those that recognized that this is a law enforcement problem." Texas, for example, has dramatically improved its collection rate since turning over responsibility for child support enforcement to the attorney general's office a decade ago. When Janet Reno, now the U.S. attorney general, reformed child support enforcement in Dade County, Fla., annual collections rose from $16.9 million to $33.6 million. "She is a hero in the inner city because she took a system that wasn't working and moved it forward," attorney H.T. Smith told U.S. News & World Report in March. The Clinton administration believes she can do the same for the nation, says Reed.

But the Department of Justice may get more law enforcement agencies involved. That could lead to stricter enforcement and a greater number of delinquent parents going to prison.

Many noncustodial parents believe that is not the answer. They say they cannot pay court-ordered child support because they are unemployed or have medical expenses, or argue that if their visitation rights were enforced, they would be more likely to pay the support.

Richard Doyle, president of the Men's Rights Association in Forest Lake, Minn., says that more interdiction will only increase the difficulty for noncustodial fathers to find the spirit and the resources to pay the support. He argues that access to visitation is linked to payment of support and that the government should enforce visitation rights as strongly as it does payment of child support.

But Matsui disagrees: "Access to visitation and child support payments are separate issues. We don't believe that there should be a link between payment of support and visitation."

Some noncustodial parents do not visit even when given every opportunity. "I struggled for the first eight years not wanting him to have anything to do with [Leah]," Martha Bond says. Soon after Bond left Graganus, she says, "we went to legal counsel, and the attorney said Tommy would pay $150 a month. He never did, and nobody enforced it. So I said no visitation rights if you're not going to pay. But he didn't care."