The Parents’ Fair Share (PFS) Demonstration:
Matching Opportunities to Obligations

Chapter 6:
Enhanced Child Support Enforcement in PFS

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Contents

1. Child Support Enforcement Policy and Practice: The PFS Context
   1. Federal IV-D Policy in Brief
   2. A Case Scenario
2. CSE Profiles of PFS Enrollees
   1. Low Ability to Pay
   2. Substantial Obligations
   3. Child Support Payments Before and After Referral to PFS
3. Implementing Enhanced Child Support Enforcement in PFS
   1. Starting Points for Enhancing Child Support Enforcement
   2. Putting the "Ability to Pay" Principle Into Practice
   3. Working Previously Unworked Cases
   4. Expeditious Case Processing Procedures
   5. Paternity Establishment
   6. The Use of Jail Sentences in Enforcement
   7. Summary of Enhancements to CSE Systems in PFS
4. Conclusions

Endnotes

The set of activities that PFS pilot sites were required to carry out in the Enhanced Child Support Enforcement component of the model goes beyond the typical practices of the CSE system in several ways to accomplish two major goals: (1) Make the job training bargain of PFS real by enforcing noncustodial parents' unique obligation under PFS to either work and pay child support or participate in PFS job training and peer support activities in preparation for work and child support responsibilities; and (2) Create for the PFS population a "responsive" child support enforcement system that tracks their obligations to their current economic circumstances both when they are unemployed and when they succeed in finding work and is tailored to the long-term goal of improving the earning power and child support potential of poor fathers.

Enhanced Child Support Enforcement in PFS was envisioned as a targeted approach that would devote more resources and attention to the noncustodial parents of AFDC children than is usual in the IV-D system where high caseloads for workers can lead to cases "falling through the cracks" or receiving low priority, especially if custodial parents do not complain about nonpayment and noncustodial parents are believed to be unemployed. Enhancements of typical CSE practices were also designed to address some of the equity and fairness issues that low-income fathers say stand in the way of fulfilling their obligations.

As it was described in a July 1991 paper written for organizations applying to become PFS pilot sites, ⁽¹⁾ Enhanced Child Support Enforcement could include:

Allocating Resources

• Identifying potential PFS enrollees from IV-D (child support) establishment and enforcement cases to enable PFS to build up a service population
• Connecting PFS enrollees to the employment and training component of PFS and monitoring their participation to ensure that the "opportunity" that PFS offers unemployed noncustodial parents is matched by their obligation to participate.
• Screening and referring PFS enrollees for services including mediation, peer support, and other PFS components, as well as to non-PFS activities in order to remove as many barriers as possible to participation in PFS and payment of child support.
• Working IV-D cases for PFS enrollees on a priority basis, whether the noncustodial parents are identified by custodial parents through the AFDC program, other agencies involved in PFS, or by the IV-D agency itself to ensure that child support establishment and enforcement efforts occur for every PFS enrollee.

Expediting Processes

• Establishing paternity in an expedited manner to enable every PFS enrollee who is provided employment and training services to acknowledge paternity within three months of enrollment in the program, if this step is needed.
• Issuing initial child support orders expeditiously to establish at least a minimum child support obligation quickly for PFS enrollees who have no previous order.
• Modifying child support orders expeditiously to enable noncustodial parents who are unemployed to have their child support obligations reduced while they improve their longer-term job prospects through PFS training, and then quickly adjusted again when they begin earning.

Enforcing Obligations

• Applying enforcement remedies (including all income intercept methods) in cases where PFS identifies noncustodial parents who have the ability to pay but have failed to do so.

This chapter first provides a context for understanding Enhanced Child Support Enforcement in PFS by briefly describing how the child support system normally works. (More detailed background information is provided in Appendix A.) In the next section, the child support characteristics of the noncustodial parents enrolled in the nine PFS pilot programs are presented, followed by a description of the pilot sites' implementation of Enhanced Child Support Enforcement. The chapter concludes by pointing to key questions from this experience for the demonstration's Phase II test of the PFS model's effects, and for the national child support system.

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I. Child Support Enforcement Policy and Practice: The PFS Context

Child support enforcement activities across the country are governed not only by the set of federal statutes and implementing regulations that constitute the IV-D system begun in 1975, but by a welter of state and local laws including statutes, case law and court rules addressing welfare and public aid, domestic relations, and civil and criminal procedure. These state and local standards are often much older than, and sometimes inconsistent with, federal child support policy. As a result, child support enforcement practices, and the institutions that are involved in overseeing and operating the CSE system, vary a great deal from state to state and locality to locality.

Variation is a dominant theme in child support enforcement practice and it characterized the implementation of the Enhanced CSE component of Parents' Fair Share during the pilot phase of the demonstration as well. However, the federal IV-D laws and regulations constitute an important benchmark for the system. They set procedural requirements and performance standards for the part of the child support enforcement system that affects welfare families ⁽²⁾ and thus define in fundamental ways how the IV-D program is supposed to operate.

Differences between the federal goals and how CSE programs actually perform partly motivated MDRC's articulation of "enhancements" for the Parents' Fair Share model. For example, the Enhanced CSE component was meant to enable PFS sites to meet federal standards for case processing timeframes for the demonstration's targeted AFDC cases goals which apply to states' entire IV-D caseloads, but were not typically being achieved. To illustrate the expectations for CSE performance that existed before the PFS programs were piloted, this section outlines the main features of the federal IV-D system. (Supplemental information appears in Appendix A.)

PFS enhancements were also designed to address IV-D case processing problems that are rooted in the life circumstances of low-income men. Over time, the IV-D program has been provided increasingly powerful tools and legal authorities for establishing obligations and collecting support, which are generally effective for noncustodial parents who work in the mainstream economy and whose families cooperate. But a significant segment of noncustodial parents whose children receive welfare are not connected to the societal institutions that make it easy for government agencies to identify and locate them such as jobs, the income tax system, the unemployment insurance system, public assistance programs, and motor vehicle or professional licensing and registration systems. For these parents, both the federal framework for the IV-D program and the variety of state and local child support enforcement practices have proven relatively less effective. As background for discussion of specific PFS innovations that address the circumstances of unemployed and potentially "disconnected" fathers later in the chapter, this section also describes the features of the federal IV-D framework that most affect low-income parents.

A. Federal IV-D Policy in Brief

Federal IV-D policy is founded in the goals of enforcing parental responsibility for the financial support of children and preventing welfare dependency, goals which have been translated into statutes and regulations that are generally designed to ensure consistent, adequate child support awards and a standardized approach to enforcement in the event of nonpayment. To narrow the range of variation in state and local practice and increase the probability of payment by absent parents, federal policy has emphasized: (1) Basing child support obligations primarily on noncustodial parents' ability to pay; (2) "Working" all child support cases to the extent possible (and not giving priority to some on the basis of current income or potential for compliance); and (3) Expeditiously performing child support functions, including both paternity and child support establishment and enforcement of orders.

1. Child Support Obligations Based on Ability to Pay

The ability to pay principle is primarily reflected in laws requiring states to adopt and use income-based criteria called child support guidelines in determining the financial obligations of noncustodial parents. Most recently, the Family Support Act of 1988 elevated the legal status of child support guidelines to a "rebuttable presumption" in child support establishment, requiring that deviations be based on specific criteria and recorded as findings of the court (or other decisionmaking entities).

Even when greater standardization is achieved through the consistent use of guidelines, however, several sources of variation across state approaches to setting child support obligations remain. Of particular importance to low-income noncustodial parents are differences in how states' guidelines balance parents' and children's income needs. For example, one of the basic models for child support guidelines which has not been widely adopted provides for an allowance for parents' subsistence before calculating child support obligations based on the remaining income; most states' guidelines have criteria for setting minimum child support orders amount when parents' income falls below a threshold.

Also important to low-income noncustodial parents are differences in "state debt" practices i.e., how states (and localities) treat parents' financial responsibilities when public assistance is provided on behalf of their children. Some states have laws that make parents liable, regardless of their ability to pay, for cash assistance, medical services, foster care or other services. States also have differing criteria for changing or "modifying" child support obligations when parents' circumstances change.

2. Working All Child Support Cases

To encourage IV-D programs to "work all cases," and to discourage selectivity, federal child support laws and regulations contain a set of rewards and penalties for states. For example, the federal government pays 66 percent of the costs of most IV-D services and 90 percent of the cost of automation and the genetic tests required for paternity establishment in contested cases at any level the states choose to spend. In addition, states keep most of the money they collect in AFDC cases and they receive incentive payments for all AFDC collections and for some non-AFDC collections (up to a cap).

These financial inducements to provide CSE program services are accompanied by federal IV-D program performance standards that set maximum timeframes for each step in processing CSE cases from the point of referral (or application) to the IV-D agency through periodic attempts to locate non-payers for enforcement and distribution of collected child support. States are also required to meet quantitative goals for increasing paternity establishment. Those that do not adhere to these standards jeopardize their federal IV-D and AFDC funding.

This federal regulatory system with its "carrots and sticks" has grown and evolved through several major amendments to the IV-D statute, mainly in response to criticism that the philosophy of a universal obligation of noncustodial parents to support their children is not borne out in day-to-day CSE operations across the country. Only some absent fathers are identified and actively pursued in order to legally establish paternity, if necessary; only some noncustodial parents without child support orders are located and engaged in this process; and only some parents with legally established obligations who do not pay are sought and compelled to pay using a variety of enforcement techniques, possibly even jail sentences.

One explanation is that the volume of cases needing child support services has grown dramatically since the federal IV-D system was established. ⁽³⁾ In addition, although financial incentives made it possible for the states, collectively, to make $40 million more than they spent on the CSE program in 1989, they are not required to reinvest child support collections and incentive payments in their IV-D programs. As a result, at the same time that a state's CSE program is generating revenue for the state treasury, the program may be "underfunded" from a IV-D manager's perspective, with staff assigned to work thousands of cases.

The IV-D system is also slow to work some cases, particularly AFDC cases, because the economic circumstances and lifestyles of noncustodial parents hamper CSE efforts and there are few incentives for either parent to cooperate. ⁽⁴⁾ CSE workers must rely on the single parents applying for AFDC to provide at least the name and address of their children's other parent(s). (The noncustodial parents' employers and social security numbers are particularly useful, but less likely to be provided.) Then, the workers "look" for noncustodial parents by trying to send them mail and by searching various computerized record systems, including state motor vehicle department records, tax records, employer records for unemployment insurance and wage reporting, and credit bureau records. With accurate identifying information, these methods make it relatively easy to locate people who work in the mainstream economy and live continuously at the same address. ⁽⁵⁾

When noncustodial parents have unstable living arrangements and sporadic or "off the books" jobs, these CSE tasks are daunting. Parents in these circumstances are difficult to "find" because CSE workers do not actually leave their offices to search and the computerized records lag the movements of people by several months at best. Because locating the noncustodial parent is the very first step in the CSE process that culminates in payment of child support, if this does not occur, the probability of payment is zero.

When noncustodial parents with unstable lifestyles don't want to be found, or custodial parent partners don't provide useable information to help locate them, their child support cases often turn out to be workable only if an unpredictable event brings the noncustodial parents to the attention of the CSE workers. This can happen when a periodic search of computerized records "hits" on a sought-after CSE case or when a noncustodial parent is arrested for an unrelated offense. But, the non-paying parents in difficult CSE cases have to be found again and again. When each CSE worker is responsible for several hundred to a few thousand cases, triage becomes the dominant approach to handling the workload and cases in which there are no leads for location are simply not worked.

3. Expeditious Case Processing

Program standards adopted in response to the Family Support Act of 1988 defined timeframes for each major step in opening and working child support cases and required states to meet these timeframe standards in 75 percent of cases. To comply, states are installing automated CSE case record systems, and many are moving parts of the child support system out of overcrowded courts by adopting non-judicial or quasi-judicial forums to hear evidence and decide child support cases. Many have also adopted consent procedures that allow noncustodial parents to legally acknowledge that they are the fathers of their children and agree to a child support award without being served with a complaint by a public attorney or prosecutor and without having to appear in court as a defendant.

B. A Case Scenario

The combination of noncooperation by noncustodial parents with little ability to pay child support, state and local laws that assign responsibility for public assistance to noncustodial parents, and bureaucratic complexities and large caseloads that slow progress on difficult cases, can result in large child support debts for poor men. The following scenario describes the how this happened for many of the noncustodial parents referred to PFS:

A woman becomes pregnant, has no medical insurance, applies for AFDC;

The welfare agency obtains the name and address of the father from the mother, initiates a paternity action and "bills" the hospital charges for the birth and ongoing AFDC costs to an account for the noncustodial parent awaiting paternity establishment;

The paternity complaint is filed and the alleged father is notified of a hearing date;

He fails to appear at the hearing, the prosecutor or public attorney recommends a default judgment on the paternity action and establishment of support based on an imputed earnings amount (for example, the minimum hourly wage rate for a 40-hour work week);

The judge or hearing officer finds the absent parent in default, and sets support based on the state's guideline amount for the imputed earnings, resulting in an order for ongoing support and requiring additional payments for the accrued state debt;

Attorney's fees and possibly other court costs and IV-D collection fees are added to the noncustodial parents' account (the child is about 6 months old at this point);

The IV-D agency initiates action to locate the absent parent and begin collection with a notice to the address given by the mother;

He does not respond and, over several months of non-response, the enforcement process escalates;

A bench warrant is issued, the noncustodial parent is picked up and arraigned;

He appears in court, now about a year after the child was born, facing a debt of thousands of dollars, which consists partly of state debt that could theoretically be reduced to a judgment and settled for a lesser amount, partly of court-ordered child support which cannot be retroactively modified, and partly of fees and interest (subject to varying adjustment policies);

Although the noncustodial parent claims that he is unemployed and has been unemployed for a year, the prosecutor or public attorney is not disposed to settlement because of his lack of cooperation;

The judge does not make any changes in the existing support award and orders the non-custodial parent to seek work.

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II. CSE Profiles of PFS Enrollees

A. Low Ability to Pay

As detailed in Chapter 3, the noncustodial parents referred to the Parents' Fair Share pilot-phase demonstration were not only unemployed, but, on average, they were disadvantaged with respect to their ability to work, earn, and pay child support. At the point they were referred to PFS, two-thirds said they had worked three months or less in the past year, and one-fourth said they had been unemployed for more than two years. Almost half of those who reported working in the last year had two or more employers. Three-fourths reported that their most recent hourly wage was less than $7.00 per hour.

Even though referrals to PFS were usually made at the time of a court appearance to explain their failure to pay child support, and the noncustodial parents had B incentives to underreport their employment and earnings at this point, answers to other questions about their situations which were less likely to seem threatening point in the same direction: poverty, low skills, barriers to employment, and sporadic income. For example, only about half of the enrollees had earned a high school diploma or GED; 46 percent reported a conviction for a criminal offense since their 16th birthday; ⁽⁶⁾ and 63 percent said that at least one of the children they were supposed to be paying support for had either probably or definitely been receiving welfare continuously since birth. ⁽⁷⁾

B. Substantial Obligations

In spite of poor employment records and poor job prospects, the PFS referral population as a whole had acquired substantial child support obligations. As shown in Table 6-1, of the PFS parents who had child support orders at the time they were referred, almost 30 percent of the orders were for $150 or more per month (per child). The all-site average amount of child support orders was $122.04 per month per child. The child support and related public assistance debts (or amounts in arrears) of the PFS population, as shown in Table 6-2, were also high: Seventy-four percent had debts over $1,000 and 29 percent had accumulated arrearages of $5,000 or more. The average child support arrearage among PFS enrollees was $4252.59. ⁽⁸⁾

TABLE 6.1

TABLE 6.2

The apparent disparity between the PFS enrollees' apparently limited ability to pay child support and the magnitude of their child support obligations and debts suggests that a responsive, enhanced child support enforcement system in the pilot sites would initially have to find ways to lower the amount of child support they were required to pay. As described in the next section, developing procedures to make downward adjustments in child support obligations was an important CSE enhancement in some sites.

The employment disadvantages of a major segment of the PFS population suggest that even those men who succeeded in landing jobs would be unlikely to earn enough to have much discretionary income; thus, responsiveness would also mean quickly establishing child support payment as a routine, non-discretionary expense via immediate withholding by employers from the parents' paychecks. As described below, most PFS sites were able to accomplish this for the program enrollees who found work.

C. Child Support Payments Before and After Referral to PFS

What did PFS parents actually pay in child support before and during the first few months after they were referred to the program? Data collected from IV-D system records on a subsample of the PFS population, shown in Table 6-3, indicates that the parents referred to the program paid an average of $37.59 per month per child during the four-month period just before they entered PFS, although there were wide variations in this amount from site to site from a low of $6.59 per month per child in Tennessee to $84.16 in Massachusetts. When noncustodial parents who paid no child support at all in the four-month pre-referral period (40 percent of the sample for the Table 6-3 analysis) were excluded from the average, child support payments went up to $62.50 per month per child.

TABLE 6.3

Although actual child support payments by PFS parents in the four months before they were referred to the program were considerably below ordered amounts, ⁽⁹⁾ they were still surprisingly high for a group supposedly unemployed at the time of referral and relatively disadvantaged in the job market, on average. There are several possible explanations. First, as described in Chapter 3, the PFS population in most sites was constituted entirely of noncustodial parents who already had support orders in place for at least one of their children an indicator that these men were among the minority of noncustodial parents of children receiving AFDC who had been married to their children's mothers, or had taken a positive step to assume responsibility for their child(ren), or had been located and had their paternity established by the IV-D program (probably with the cooperation of the custodial parents). In other words, while the program's eligibility criteria unemployment and children receiving AFDC were likely to have yielded a disadvantaged group of noncustodial parents, the PFS parents had already been "found" by the CSE system and were thus, by definition, not among the most difficult IV-D cases by the time they were referred to the program.

Other explanations for the surprising level of pre-referral child support payments by the PFS population include the diversity of circumstances represented in averages: It is possible for a substantial segment of noncustodial parents to have had sporadic employment in the year before they were referred to PFS at the same time that 60 percent paid some child support in the four months before entering the program. However, this discrepancy might also indicate that noncustodial parents had earnings that they did not fully report to child support staff at the time they were referred to PFS, or that someone else was helping them out with expenses. Child support guidelines that result in relatively high child support obligations as a percentage of noncustodial parents' income might also account for the difference between the incidence and amount of pre-referral payments and the bleak self-reports of unemployment and low wages.

In the four-month period after referral to the program, the average payments made by the PFS parents decreased in some sites and increased in others, resulting in almost no change in the all-site average. (See Table 6-3.) During this period, the PFS subsample group paid an average of $37.30 per month per child. Excluding those who paid nothing at all, the all-site average for the post-referral period of $62.01 per month per child almost exactly matched the pre-referral figure, again reflecting wide variation across the sites with changes in both directions from the pre-referral to the early post-referral period.

MDRC staff did not necessarily expect a consistent pattern in payments across sites from immediately before referral to immediately after for this brief pilot phase period especially given substantial differences across the sites in local CSE practices and in the approaches they took to creating responsive child support systems. For example, the next section outlines procedures adopted in some sites to reduce support obligations in the immediate post-referral period, while others were starting with minimum child support orders for most PFS cases and making upward adjustments as the parents found employment. Additional influences on short-term payment patterns include: Differences in the employability characteristics of the sites' noncustodial parents; more or less active job markets; wages rate differences across sites; and different program designs that lead to variations in the length of time PFS enrollees spend in education and job training (and, thus, out of the labor market).

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III. Implementing Enhanced Child Support Enforcement in PFS

All nine PFS sites made progress during the pilot stage of the demonstration in building a CSE system able to respond to the circumstances of the target group and effectively enforce noncustodial parents' child support obligations, but they started from different points, faced different challenges and produced unique local solutions in order to accomplish the key tasks of the Enhanced CSE component. In spite of the diversity of approaches to Enhanced Child Support Enforcement in PFS, themes and lessons emerged that provide valuable points of reference for the next stage of the PFS Demonstration and perhaps for the CSE system nationwide.

A. Starting Points for Enhancing Child Support Enforcement

Echoing the hallmark variation in child support enforcement policies and practices across the country, the pilot sites in the Parents' Fair Share Demonstration started developing Enhanced Child Support Enforcement components under widely varying conditions. For example, the Kent County, Michigan, and Duval County, Florida, sites had experimented with using the child support enforcement agency as the "front door" to court-ordered job search programs for unemployed absent parents, and thus already had in place some procedures to identify and work non-paying AFDC cases even if child support obligors had no known source of income. But before applying to join the demonstration, neither of these sites had policies and practices to routinely adjust the child support obligations of unemployed noncustodial parents to their immediate ability to pay.

In the Hampden County, Massachusetts, site, judges customarily set child support orders in AFDC cases at the minimum of $50 per month for noncustodial parents who were jobless at the time of a hearing for support establishment, but then the IV-D agency gave second-order priority to enforcement for nonpayment in such cases. In other PFS sites, the child support cases of non-payers with no evidence of employment were worked only by sending "seek work" orders in the mail (a Montgomery County, Ohio, practice) or by checking the computer matches of CSE cases with unemployment insurance (UI) beneficiaries and employees covered by the UI wage reporting system.

These examples reflect differences in philosophy, statutes and operational environments. In Kent County (Grand Rapids), the prevailing view of men who were not keeping up with their child support was that almost all could work especially if they regularly attended and took advantage of the job search services offered and therefore they should pay. While the state's child support guideline provided for a minimum child support order in no-income cases (not less than $5 per week for one child), this was rarely applied; instead, the state's median income was imputed to unemployed obligors (based on their historical work records or prevailing wage rates) according to a provision of the guidelines that called unemployment an "unexercised ability to earn." Furthermore, Kent County had a reputation for high-performance enforcement ⁽¹⁰⁾ and a concomitant willingness to use all available enforcement methods to induce obligors to pay, including jail sentences. Compared to its eight counterparts, this PFS pilot site started building an enhanced child support enforcement component from a position of hardnosed enforcement and was asked, in effect, to broaden its repertoire by adding incentives for the most disadvantaged unemployed noncustodial parents to cooperate.

In Duval County, Florida, the efficiency of the enforcement side of the CSE system was a prime focus when the PFS pilot site began implementation. Although working no-income cases was a well-established practice prior to PFS because absent parents found to be unemployed could be referred to a supervised job search activity run for recipients of AFDC under Florida's JOBS program, called Project Independence child support orders were rarely modified either upward or downward in the CSE district encompassing Duval County and the state's guidelines specify that unemployment is a "frivolous" basis for adjusting orders. Jail sentences for non-payers of child support were relatively common in Duval County.

These policies were important to whether Duval County's PFS consortium would succeed in implementing a responsive CSE system for PFS, but perhaps more important were major organizational and logistical challenges the IV-D system faced in moving cases through the enforcement process: In Florida's Region IV CSE district, which Duval County's caseload dominated, twenty District Court judges heard child support cases and those cases could be assigned to any one of more than 200 CSE staff. Thus, child support enforcement officials were most interested in ensuring that men who failed to comply with referrals to job search did not "fall through the cracks" of the CSE system; they were not as enthusiastic about adjusting child support orders of PFS participants because this would generate increased case activity in an already overextended system. In PFS, however, the Duval County CSE system was being asked to elevate in importance the noncustodial parents' ability to pay and handle the resulting increase in case activity at the same time a major reorganization of the court-CSE interface was being undertaken.

Due to similar pressures, the CSE environment in Massachusetts was not favorable for the state's IV-D agency, the Department of Revenue (DOR), to consider diverting resources to work no-income cases. The state's child support guidelines for imputing income place the burden on courts to find capability to work (or to work more or earn more) when an obligor claims unemployment; thus, the courts routinely establish minimum child support orders for noncustodial parents claiming unemployment unless the IV-D agency has evidence to the contrary. At the start-up of the Parents' Fair Share Demonstration, DOR was under considerable pressure to improve its collections performance in AFDC cases as a state cost savings strategy. Thus, the PFS challenge for the IV-D agency in this site was to identify PFS-eligible individuals and process their cases expeditiously while achieving productivity increases across the board.

These three sites also provide examples of the varying organizational structures in Enhanced Child Support Enforcement. The Kent County PFS site was the only one in the pilot-phase demonstration in which a lead role was taken by the IV-D agency responsible for enforcement. This agency, the Kent County Friend of the Court (FOC), is supervised by the judiciary and handles all cases in which child support has been ordered by the court, monitoring payment, managing collections, and conduct first-level administrative case-finding (with hearing officers) in enforcement cases. The FOC cooperates in the local IV-D program with several other agencies: the regional office of the state social services and IV-D agency, which is responsible for initiating paternity and support establishment; the county prosecutor, who files paternity complaints and related support petitions with the courts; and probate and district courts, which act on petitions regarding paternity (the probate court), support establishment and modification, and support enforcement (district court). In cases in which the parties agree, the FOC conducts conciliation conferences to establish child support and visitation; contested divorce or paternity cases typically come to the FOC after support is established by the court. Two FOC staff who were dedicated to the Parents' Fair Share project referred eligible noncustodial parents who always had a support order in place to the site's employment component.

The Duval County, Florida, site experienced two major reorganizations within agencies participating in the PFS consortium during the pilot phase of PFS. The IV-D agency, a subdivision of the state Department of Health and Rehabilitative Services (DHRS) with a District IV office in Jacksonville, took steps to increase the efficiency of CSE case processing in cooperation with the state court system's Jacksonville-based District Court by adopting specialization approaches. Child support cases previously heard by twenty District Court judges were shifted to the newly created Family Court, along with seven judges who volunteered to transfer and concentrate on this caseload; within the IV-D agency, a court unit of seven workers and a supervisor was created to handle all activities related to hearings and court-based transactions. In a second realignment, the lead agency for PFS in Duval County, responsible for the JOBS program (Project Independence), was transferred from DHRS to the Florida Department of Labor and Employment Security.

Nevertheless, Enhanced Child Support Enforcement in PFS maintained its original structure: All District IV CSE enforcement caseworkers were charged with identifying eligible noncustodial parents (those with child support orders in place who were not paying and had no identifiable source of income) and recommending to judges that they be referred to PFS; judges ordered the participation of these parents; Project Independence staff were responsible for keeping track of their attendance and reporting non-compliance to the CSE enforcement caseworkers; and a PFS-hired case aide worked with the CSE staff to ensure that enforcement action was initiated in cases of non-compliance and that income deduction orders (to withhold child support from parents' wages) were prepared and sent to employers when participants got jobs.

The Hampden County, Massachusetts, PFS site was led by the agency responsible for providing employment and training services to PFS enrollees the Springfield Employment Resource Center (SERC), a nonprofit agency under contract to the state's welfare department, which supervised the JOBS program. The State Department of Revenue's CSE unit in Springfield provided Enhanced Child Support Enforcement in PFS. With a staffing structure similar to the Florida site's, the child support cases of the PFS participants were dispersed among the county's eight litigation unit case analysts. These staff were responsible for monitoring the activities of those referred; initiating upward adjustments in child support orders when PFS participants dropped out of the program or found work; and implementing income deduction orders.

Routine communication between the employment and training providers in Springfield's PFS program and the DOR case analysts was usually accomplished by copying each other on forms, but DOR designated a liaison to the PFS program (who had two designated back-ups) to stay abreast of program changes and straighten out unusual cases. In a move similar to the reorganization that occurred in Duval County, there was a major change (requested by DOR) in jurisdiction over CSE cases in the Massachusetts site during the PFS pilot phase. To consolidate jurisdiction over child support and authority to decide custody and visitation issues, and to achieve more uniform court procedures for IV-D cases, new cases began to be heard in Probate Court early in 1993 rather than in District Court. (In the western Massachusetts region that encompasses Springfield, there are forty District Court judges and only eight Probate Court judges.)

Similar portraits of the child support enforcement conditions in the other six pilot sites would highlight the importance of state and local leaders' policy preferences, customary practices, bureaucratic politics and personalities, and community and agency cultures rather than particular statutory dictates or constraints. The pilot experience revealed a few clear statutory barriers to fully implementing the PFS vision of responsive child support enforcement, which will be detailed below, but in the main, the institutional conditions under which the nine sites started to build Enhanced Child Support Enforcement components proved amenable to change over time just not amenable to change by a single approach.

More important than legal and institutional structures to the implementation of Enhanced Child Support Enforcement in the pilot sites, was the complexity of the IV-D and the resulting difficulty in making changes in CSE operations. At the policy level, child support enforcement involves numerous agencies across judicial, executive and legislative branches of federal, state and local government; at the day-to-day implementation level, most sites had to work with several judicial and executive agencies typically including the local welfare agency, a local public attorney or prosecuting attorney, a court administration agency, one or more courts (usually a district and/or probate court), process servers from a marshall's, sheriff's, or other court officer agency, and the local child support enforcement administrative agency.

B. Putting the "Ability to Pay" Principle Into Practice

1. Child Support Guidelines in PFS States

The determination of child support obligations in the PFS demonstration sites is governed by nine different sets of state child support guidelines, whose provisions are summarized in Appendix B. These guidelines constitute one of the few statutory constraints on PFS sites' ability to make changes in local child support enforcement practice in order to enhance it for the demonstration's target population because they precisely define what "ability to pay" child support means in each state.

For the typical noncustodial parent referred to PFS an unemployed noncustodial parent with one or two children the guidelines governing how child support obligations are set in most of the nine states with pilot sites theoretically could produce a minimum child support order in an amount ranging from zero to $50 per month for one child. All of the PFS states except Missouri have threshold income levels for noncustodial parents below which judges or other decisionmakers in support cases are allowed to set minimum orders on a case-by-case basis corresponding with the parents' ability to pay.⁽¹¹⁾ Some states specify the amount of the minimum order for example, in Massachusetts, it is not less than $50 per month (or per AFDC case, in order to provide for a pass-through of payment to welfare families), and in New Jersey, the minimum must be a specific amount between $5 and $10 per week. In other states, the minimum amount is not specified; in Alabama and Ohio, judges may set the minimum at their discretion, but in Ohio they are required to deviate from the guidelines (make a written finding) in order to set an award at zero. (Ohio recently adopted a statewide minimum order amount of $50 per month.) In Minnesota, judges may order community service for obligors totally unable to contribute child support.

As described above, data collected on the amount of child support obligations of parents referred to PFS (see Table 6-1) suggest that most sites did not consistently make use was made of provisions of state child support guidelines that allow minimum orders when obligors have minimal or no income. ⁽¹²⁾ Two PFS sites found that their states' child support guidelines presented problems for adjusting noncustodial parents' orders down to a minimum. Missouri's guidelines, as noted above, do not incorporate a threshold income level below which a minimum order is considered. Instead, child support orders are set based on a percentage of parents' income. Parents with incomes as low as $100 per month must pay a percentage-based amount; at this level, the state's guidelines produce obligations of $24 per month for one child and $37 for two children. (Tennessee's very low threshold income level has a similar effect: At $100 per month gross income, Tennessee's guidelines call for noncustodial parents to pay 22 percent of income for support of one child.)

Ohio's child support guidelines contained an unusual combination of restrictions for adjusting orders downward to a minimum. Noncustodial parents must have earned less than $6,000 in a year and have been unemployed for at least three months to qualify for a minimum order; otherwise, judges are required to formally deviate from child support guidelines (and thus make a written finding) in order to set child support at the minimum. However, because few of the noncustodial parents referred to PFS in the two Ohio programs reported being unemployed for less than three months 7 and 9 percent approximately the same as in other sites, which was 7 percent for the all-site PFS population, including Ohio it is not clear whether the state's guidelines would have been a real constraint if Ohio had adopted a policy of adjusting child support orders to the minimum during PFS participants' involvement in the program. In Montgomery County, Ohio, a major court frequently did not set any child support orders for unemployed noncustodial parents and, instead, issued seek work orders for them.

Two additional features of the child support guidelines governing the PFS sites can affect the amount that noncustodial parents are required to pay. First, the guidelines for each of the nine PFS states allow judges or other decisionmakers to impute income in certain circumstances that is, to make an assumption about parents' earnings or earning capacity. This is permitted to discourage noncustodial parents from either quitting jobs or failing to provide income information in order to avoid child support obligations. Thus, income is imputed most often when a noncustodial parent is considered voluntarily unemployed or underemployed or does not appear for a hearing to establish support. Ohio's guidelines for imputing income, which are similar to other states', take into consideration the parent's employment potential and probable earnings based on his/her recent work history, occupational qualifications, and prevailing job opportunities and salary levels in the community in which the parent resides. These provisions for imputing income effectively give judges and other child support decisionmakers discretion to choose between a minimum order and an income-based order for unemployed noncustodial parents.

Second, guidelines for some states allow for in-kind support by noncustodial parents (in lieu of cash). Missouri, New Jersey and Ohio sites' guidelines allow courts to consider such support, which may result in child support orders below the guidelines amounts, whereas Minnesota's guidelines specifically prohibit this practice. (Alabama's, Florida's, Massachusetts' and Michigan's guidelines do not address in-kind support.)

How much are PFS noncustodial parents required to pay based on their states' child support guidelines when they successfully "graduate" from the program, find a job, and have their child support orders re-adjusted to match their new income? For one child, parents who earn enough to put their income above the threshold that triggers a child support obligation based on the percentage of income (instead of a flat-amount minimum order) are required to pay between 4 percent and 25 percent of income, depending on the exact income level. (Some states use gross income and others use net income to determine the obligation and allowable deductions vary as well. See Appendix B for state-by-state guideline provisions.)

However, some states' guidelines are structured like regressive income tax schedules so that poorer parents pay a larger proportion of their income in child support than higher-income parents. For example, the rates in Ohio's guidelines are highest in the $700 - $800 range, which equates to a full-time job that pays about $5.00 per hour and annual earnings of $8,400 to $10,800 a below-poverty-level income for a family of three. Parents are required to pay 22 percent of income for one child and 27 percent for two children at $700 gross monthly income and 21 percent and 33 percent for one and two children at $800 income. These rates are about the same as Missouri's for this income range. As noted above, Missouri does not have a threshold income level for minimum orders. In addition, Missouri's guidelines are also based on a regressive structure, beginning with a 24 percent rate for parents with a combined gross income of $100 - $400 per month, and going down to 22 percent in the gross income range of $500 - $600, 21 percent for income of $700 per month, and 20 percent for income of $800 - $1,000 per month.

Minnesota and New Jersey have progressive rate structures in their child support guidelines, but in the $700 - $800 per month gross income range, these two states and Florida require about 23-24 percent of income for child support, resulting in an obligation of about $175 per month for one child (if no deductions are allowed), which would reduce the income of noncustodial parents in these circumstances (assuming the custodial parents receive AFDC and have no income) to about $575 per month or about $135 per week. This amount is still considerably more than the median state AFDC grant for an adult and two children, and is just above the poverty level for a single person. ⁽¹³⁾

2. Adjusting Obligations Downward for Unemployed Noncustodial Parents

A key enhancement to the child support enforcement systems in PFS sites was a method to adjust noncustodial parents' child support obligations downward to reflect their unemployed status and lowered ability to pay support at the point they enrolled in the program. Over the 12 to 18-month pilot phase demonstration, it became the standard practice in three PFS sites Minnesota, Missouri, and Tennessee to reduce the existing child support orders of PFS enrollees to the minimum amount allowed by state child support guidelines when noncustodial parents were found to be unemployed at the time of an enforcement hearing called because of their failure to pay. New Jersey also frequently reduced child support obligations, but typically not to the very minimum allowed by the guidelines. In the Michigan site, as an alternative to setting minimum orders, child support obligations were temporarily suspended during PFS participation.

Alabama, Florida, and Ohio did not routinely and consistently adjust PFS enrollees' child support orders during the pilot phase of the PFS Demonstration, although Ohio encouraged PFS parents to petition the court to modify existing orders and suspended enforcement while they were involved in the program. Prior to PFS implementation in Massachusetts, it had been the standard practice to set child support obligations at the minimum for unemployed noncustodial parents coming before the court, as well as to suspend the orders of parents who lost their jobs after child support was established.

Because changes in child support orders generate work for already overburdened IV-D agencies and courts, the procedures that some PFS sites devised for reducing child support obligations of parents referred to PFS were designed to minimize return trips to court (or to administrative hearing forums) when the parents' fast-changing circumstances changed again. For example, in Anoka County, Minnesota, noncustodial parents were required to participate in PFS as a condition of receiving a temporary reduction in their child support orders to $50 per month. The parents stipulated to such court orders meaning they agreed to the conditions and their original orders were reinstated (without further court action) if they either failed to participate or got jobs. A similar stipulation was employed in Kent County, Michigan, although the temporary change was to suspend the court-ordered support during PFS participation (effectively creating a temporary child support order of zero) if noncustodial parents satisfied program attendance requirements. Under this arrangement, the obligation to pay the original court-ordered amount of child support was reinstated without a hearing as of the date a parent either completed the program or found a job; if he failed to comply with the stipulated agreement, the original support amount was effective from the date of the agreement and he owed back support for the period in which the order was suspended.

Similar incentive-oriented approaches to reducing child support obligations during PFS participation were employed in the Missouri and Tennessee sites: First, the obligations of noncustodial parents referred to PFS were reduced to the minimum amount allowed by the guidelines (usually $50 per month per child) by Tennessee's Juvenile Court judges and Missouri's administrative hearing officers and then parents could have even these minimum amounts of child support credited as paid if they satisfactorily participated in PFS. In the early months of PFS operation, the Missouri site also forgave unpaid child support debts of noncustodial parents under certain circumstances, but this policy ran afoul of federal interpretation of a 1986 law called the Bradley Amendment prohibiting retroactive modification of child support orders and it was dropped.

In the sites that made no changes for PFS in their pre-existing methods of applying state child support guidelines, there were already in place some methods for making the CSE systems responsive to the PFS populations' circumstances. For example, the Massachusetts practice of setting minimum orders (usually $50 per month) when a noncustodial parent was found to be unemployed at the time of an establishment hearing, combined with a policy of suspending enforcement for unemployed noncustodial parents i.e., refraining from issuing bench warrants, executing liens, or taking other legal actions to compel payment produced an overall approach for adjusting CSE obligations to noncustodial parents' ability to pay that was not very different from some PFS innovations.

The approach of suspending support obligations adopted by the Michigan site for PFS went hand-in-hand with a practice of providing PFS enrollees with information about how to petition the court to reduce orders they felt were too high, a procedure which was quite simple. During the pilot phase, the Michigan site also began reviewing PFS cases in which child support orders had been set by default in the absence of information about the noncustodial parents' income, resulting in very high arrearages. Arrears in these cases were occasionally reduced to judgments and settled for less than the accumulated debt effectively compensating for an initial mismatch between the noncustodial parents' ability to pay and their previous child support orders. Such mismatches were particularly likely to have occurred in the Michigan site because the formula used to set child support in these cases imputed the state's net median income ($260 per week) to the noncustodial parents, resulting in an order of $67 per week for one child ($268 per month). Not surprisingly, a larger proportion of parents referred to Michigan's PFS program than in any other site had child support arrearages of $5,000 or more 53 percent. (Florida was second at 44 percent.) Michigan also reviewed and revised its policy for assigning responsibility to noncustodial parents for "confinement costs" (medical expenses for births) during the pilot demonstration to avoid these high debts.

3. Upward Adjustments in Child Support Obligations

To implement a fully responsive child support enforcement system, PFS sites also needed to adopt methods of quickly adjusting parents' support orders upward when they went to work or when they failed to fulfill their obligation to participate in the program. The temporary reduction, suspension and crediting methods for downward adjustments in child support orders discussed above were usually chosen by PFS sites because it is often easier to reinstate a previous child support order than to review and modify a minimum order especially if the conditions for reinstatement, such as successful completion of PFS or failure to satisfactorily participate in PFS, are stipulated in advance by the noncustodial parent and a court review schedule is also set up in the order enabling the court to retain jurisdiction over the case. Courts may also delegate this readjustment authority to administrative agencies based on prior agreements; in jurisdictions where this is allowed, the IV-D agency is empowered to act without going back to court, avoiding delays that can result from full dockets. (PFS sites also instituted several procedures to minimize the slowdown in child support establishment and enforcement that full court calendars can produce.)

Upward modification of child support orders for PFS enrollees was not automatic, however. The New Jersey site, which routinely reduced the child support orders of the PFS fathers to $15-20 per month per child, made the decision to put off bringing these cases back to court until a routine three-year adjustment and review was scheduled in part, to enable the PFS fathers time to get on their feet

C. Working Previously Unworked Cases

1. Enhanced CSE Staffing

The main solution to working the difficult usually low-priority cases that were targeted for the Parents' Fair Share Demonstration was to hire or reassign CSE workers who would be solely dedicated to a PFS caseload. This step was taken in Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, New Jersey, Ohio and Tennessee. Searching computerized child support databases and court dockets for noncustodial parents likely to be eligible for Parents' Fair Share and making sure these men got referred to the program were major tasks of most new dedicated workers.

Adding specialized staff in the IV-D agency for PFS cases did not guarantee that previously unworked cases would receive attention, however. One reason was that the CSE workers dedicated to PFS caseloads also spent a substantial proportion of their time conducting intake interviews, handling procedures to suspend or reinstate child support orders, following up on non-compliance, and getting income deduction orders (for immediate wage withholding) in place for the PFS participants who went to work. Also, in some sites the pre-existing child support enforcement process generated a continuous flow of PFS-eligible cases so that it was not necessary to identify old, unworked cases in order to operate the pilot-phase program.

Dedicating CSE staff to PFS cases was encouraged, but not required in the pilot phase of the demonstration. In the sites that chose not to assign the PFS caseload to specialized CSE caseworkers, organizational arrangements were made to ensure that even if PFS cases were dispersed among regular CSE workers, they were not neglected. For example, in Florida, the PFS program hired a CSE administrative aide who kept track of CSE actions on PFS cases, prompted the regular CSE caseworkers when they needed to initiate enforcement steps, and performed the clerical tasks necessary to get income deduction orders to the employers of PFS participants who went to work. In Massachusetts, three CSE managers were designated liaisons to the PFS program. This meant that even though the IV-D cases of PFS enrollees were dispersed throughout the entire unit of the Springfield office of the Department of Revenue (DOR) responsible for child support enforcement, staff from the other agencies in the Massachusetts PFS consortium could identify DOR staff whose job it was to relay policy and program information to the whole unit and solve difficult problems. There was a liaison with similar responsibilities in Alabama.

In Montgomery County, Ohio, a CSE agency staff person was designated to act on PFS cases even though he did not carry a PFS caseload. In addition, he reviewed the CSE agency's monthly "default" list (the non-paying or delinquent obligors the enforcement cases) to refer apparently eligible noncustodial parents to the prosecutor for a summons to a hearing and court order to participate in PFS; he also reviewed new paternity cases and the Domestic Relations Court docket to mark potentially eligible cases for judges and referees.

2. Demonstrating the "Smoke-Out" Potential of Previously Unworked Cases

The Ohio PFS site provided a clear example during the pilot phase demonstration of the potential for uncovering previously unknown employment and collecting child support when IV-D agencies work all cases and back up universal enforcement with a substantial participation requirement. Before the PFS program existed in Dayton, noncustodial parents who were not paying on their child support orders (and for whom no current income information was available) would have been sent letters directing them to seek work. Now that the option is available to send unemployed parents to job search and job training services offered by PFS, the non-payers who have custodial parent partners receiving AFDC are called into court.

As of May 1993, approximately 1,300 hearings were scheduled for noncustodial parents had not been paying court-ordered support and 650 parents showed up in response to summonses. (Many of the rest will eventually show up in court when they are personally served.) Of these, nearly 190 admitted previously-unreported employment when confronted with the possibility of being referred to PFS, and income withholding was immediately instituted for them. This is a pure net impact of the PFS intervention. The other 460 who came to court were referred to PFS for services.

3. Which CSE Cases Are Worked?

While several other sites, in addition to Ohio, may have begun to work more non-paying child support cases during the PFS pilot phase, it was difficult to pin down the previous practices and an essential question remains unanswered during the pilot phase of PFS: Which non-paying obligors were subject to enforcement and what types or levels of enforcement? Only the Florida site seemed to have routinely worked no-income cases prior to PFS, but CSE officials in the sites often reported exceptions and had no hard and fast rules to describe how cases were identified for enforcement. As a result, it is equally difficult to clarify precisely how the PFS pilot demonstration has changed child support enforcement in the nine sites and gauge the extent of the program's "smoke out" effect, as documented in Ohio, that occurred elsewhere.

One reason that it is difficult to understand which CSE cases are worked is that many CSE administrators are reluctant to talk about any divergence between the expectations set forth in federal regulations for case processing and the reality of local practice. (Federal standards are described in Appendix A.) In addition, the triage of cases that characterized IV-D operations occurs at the caseworker level when these staff select from overfilled in-boxes or computer messages the items for action that provide new, useable information and set aside the inquiries with negative responses; administrators may not see this process at close hand.

It should also be noted that "working cases" can mean as little as checking quarterly data reported by employers to the Unemployment Insurance wage reporting system to identify non-payers with identifiable employers, or it can mean the kind of effort made by Ohio, which tried to cast a net widely to bring in all noncustodial parents in AFDC cases who were behind on their child support.

For example, although the Michigan PFS site periodically produced a list of potentially eligible noncustodial parents from its computerized data base by selecting non-paying cases in which there was no employer recorded, these lists were not used very often to find PFS-eligible parents because an adequate flow of referrals to the program was continually generated by the enforcement process. In other words, cases were being "worked" that resulted in PFS enrollees, but the universe of PFS-eligible parents was at least partially pre-selected by the enforcement process.

The relationship between the PFS program in this site and regular CSE enforcement activities was relatively straightforward: When parents of AFDC children who had not been paying court-ordered child support were questioned in an enforcement hearing and found to be unemployed, they were referred to PFS. But who among all the non-paying absent parents of AFDC children ended up in court and thus which parents were targeted for PFS were sensitive questions during the pilot phase because many of the African-American men enrolled in PFS perceived child support enforcement (and PFS by extension) to be aimed at them. ⁽¹⁴⁾

The answers to questions about which noncustodial parents end up in court on child support complaints may have more to do with the police practices in most communities than with the child support system per se. When child support enforcement escalates to the stage of issuing a bench warrant, cooperative law enforcement agreements in many communities call for these warrants to be posted to all police officers' information systems. The result is that anyone stopped by a law enforcement official for any reason (traffic offense, broken tail light on a car, "suspicious" behavior, etc.) might be identified, questioned and then detained for child support when the law enforcement official checks for outstanding warrants against the person stopped. If there is a disproportionate police presence in low-income and minority neighborhoods, then child support enforcement look selective, based on poverty versus privilege, minority versus majority status especially when such neighborhoods have higher unemployment rates than surrounding communities and a potentially higher concentration of noncustodial parents unable to pay support.

D. Expeditious Case Processing Procedures

Expeditious procedures were also essential to managing the PFS caseloads. Some were discovered in place and others were adopted as enhancements for child support enforcement during the pilot phase. Among the most important were:

• Consent rather than adversarial processes.

Although it was not an important source of referrals to PFS, Kent County, Michigan, conducted a paternity acknowledgement program in local hospitals an example of such procedures.

• "Mass" procedures for dealing with crowded court calendars.

Several PFS sites were able to get a regular block of a court schedule allocated to the child support agency specifically for PFS cases without requiring that the individual cases be docketed days or weeks in advance.

• Court orders that cover several contingencies or scenarios.

These contingent procedures enable courts to maintain jurisdiction in cases and/or administrative agencies to take action without having a case reheard, as when child support obligations are suspended under rules for reinstating them when noncustodial parents do not attend PFS activities.

• "Portable" income deduction orders.

Such orders allow wage withholding for any job a noncustodial parent is found to hold; with these orders, CSE staff do not have to return to court to request a new order when they learn of a parent's job change. (See below for PFS examples.)

• Court exercise of continuing jurisdiction over CSE cases in which effective service of process has been accomplished once.

These procedures usually apply to temporary or suspended child support orders and might be combined with the practice of scheduling future court hearings on PFS participants' progress at the time of a hearing to refer them to the program. The continuing jurisdiction makes it possible to notify noncustodial parents about their status and obligations in practical, time-saving ways and to act in response to parents change in circumstances or behavior.

• Deputizing staff attorneys of the IV-D agency as prosecutors.

This enables them to negotiate complaints and settle judgments (which might follow pre-set guidelines) in order to avoid litigation.

The common denominator for these procedures is the courts which are not the first or only bottleneck in IV-D case processing, but did represent a major challenge in several sites. As noted above, both the Florida and Massachusetts sites shifted IV-D dockets to specific judges during the pilot demonstration in response to the difficulties of managing CSE caseloads. To carry out a 1993 law passed by the state legislature, Minnesota will implement an administrative process for child support and establishment in 1994 and Ohio recently added administrative procedures for paternity and support establishment to its court-based CSE system. Missouri already had an administrative (non-judicial) CSE system when PFS began, the only such CSE system in the pilot-phase demonstration. In other sites, most notably Michigan, numerous court functions were delegated to hearing officers or administrative agency staff on the basis of agreements with the courts about precise procedures to be followed and when discretion was appropriate.

One IV-D procedure of importance in PFS was mandated by federal law but might also be considered an example of expeditious case processing immediate income withholding for new or modified child support orders or for non-paying cases. (See Appendix A for details of this requirement.) "Immediate" is a critical attribute of this procedure. Staff in several PFS sites related cases in which noncustodial parents succeeded in finding jobs, but collected two or three paychecks before the CSE system was able to get income withholding orders approved by the court, if necessary, and to the parents' employers. These men had gotten accustomed to receiving their entire wages and the shock of the child support deduction, when it finally occurred, was so great that they quit.

While such anecdotes might be better examples of the war stories that noncustodial parents often tell each other about their child support experiences than a basis for policy, there were clearly sites in the PFS pilot phase demonstration that had an easier methods of instituting income withholding. The simplest approach was the portable income deduction order (IDO). The Florida and Michigan CSE staff, for example, made it a practice to ask the court for an IDO that would apply to all of an obligor's subsequent employers at the time that support was established rather than requesting court approval for every instance in which income was to be withheld, which was the traditional approach under rules that only allowed income withholding when an arrearage existed. This simplified the CSE task of keeping up in "real time" with noncustodial parents who change jobs frequently. ⁽¹⁵⁾

E. Paternity Establishment

Although Parents' Fair Share is principally aimed at the segment of noncustodial parents in welfare cases who already have child support orders in place, three PFS sites, Michigan, Missouri and New Jersey, set out in the pilot phase of the demonstration to conduct "early intervention" by recruiting noncustodial parents who had not yet established paternity. Because the jurisdiction of the Kent County, Michigan, Friend of the Court is limited in paternity cases to conciliation for the purpose of establishing child support and visitation agreements (which are subject to the District Court's approval), early intervention in the Michigan PFS site occurred prior to PFS enrollment and did not account for a substantial share of the PFS cases. The model used in this county for hospital-based paternity acknowledgement did point up two interesting statistics, however: About half of the partners in out-of-wedlock births in local hospitals were willing to acknowledge paternity by signing "legitimation affidavits," but only in about half the paternity acknowledgement cases did the mother eventually (within about a year) receive AFDC.

New Jersey's early intervention component was included in PFS and it involved direct recruitment of alleged fathers by the non-profit agency in the lead on PFS after mothers applying for AFDC identified them (rather than limiting the program's intake process to referrals by the IV-D agency and courts). There was no special data collection effort during the pilot phase to assess whether this approach increased paternity establishments among the target group in Mercer County. However, in the next phase of the demonstration, there will be an opportunity to test its effects. a key questions is whether such a model makes it possible to circumvent a perennial bottleneck in the paternity establishment process overworked AFDC eligibility workers whose principal focus is on applicants' (usually mothers') economic circumstances rather than on facilitating paternity establishment by IV-D agencies.

Missouri's early intervention activities were also focused on recruiting volunteers for PFS who had not yet established paternity but could be attracted to the program with an offer of job training and placement assistance. Because this site recruited volunteers among noncustodial parents with child support orders as well, its early intervention was not clearly distinguished from the overall program model and no data are available on the rate at which paternity was established for those enrollees needing it.

F. The Use of Jail Sentences in Enforcement

One barometer of the strength of child support enforcement in a community is whether or not is it possible for a noncustodial parent who is behind on his child support to be sentenced to jail; a related measure is the likelihood of this outcome. Jail sentences were possible in all but two PFS sites. While MDRC did not collect data in the pilot phase to estimate the likelihood of this outcome in CSE cases, there was clearly a range of possibilities across the sites with Alabama, Florida, and Tennessee being the most likely to impose a jail sentences for failure to pay court-ordered child support.

Most of the other PFS sites used jail for child support enforcement only rarely prior to the start-up of PFS. Ironically, the Michigan site's CSE officials wanted to have jail sentences as an option but during the year or so before the pilot demonstration and during most of the PFS pilot period, the Kent County jails were so overcrowded that jail space was rented in a nearby county and the facilities were not available to the Friend of the Court.

G. Summary of Enhancements to CSE Systems in PFS

Table 6-4 summarizes enhancements to child support enforcement practices in the nine pilot sites and displays as well some of the pre-existing features of the sites' IV-D systems that shaped their approaches to Enhanced Child Support in PFS. The complexity of the activities and environments is not readily apparent in such a representation of these nine programs, ⁽¹⁶⁾ especially because some sites had to enhance their CSE programs in order to make them work effectively for PFS parents and other had features in place when PFS started that were well-suited to managing the cases of these parents. However, one site does stand out in this summary for having implemented few enhancements to its CSE system for Parents' Fair Share: Alabama tried very few of the methods listed in order to adjust child support obligations to the noncustodial parents' ability to pay, work more child support cases, or expedite case processing.

TABLE 6.4

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IV. Conclusions

Nationally, the Child Support Enforcement system is characterized by variation, the stresses of interagency coordination and cooperation, and pressures from the federal government to improve performance. In short, it is a system undergoing change in one general direction but by a lot of different, perhaps roundabout, routes. The pilot phase of PFS called for additional course adjustments. Specifically, Parents' Fair Share asked IV-D agencies in the demonstration not only to work difficult cases, but to create a responsive CSE system for the target group that quickly adjusted their child support obligations to their ability to pay and kept track in "real time" as opposed to the lag-time of computerized record-searching of where they were and what they were doing.

Clearly, the nine sites were able to make some adjustments and by the fall of 1993, a number of new practices suggested that future CSE case processing for PFS participants would be even easier. Within the constraints of the states' existing child support guidelines, the nine states were moving to align child support policies and practices in the demonstration sites with the ability to pay principle, and to make the existing CSE system work better for the PFS target group. While no single case processing procedure or organizational structure seems to have guaranteed success during the pilot phase of PFS, sites that were most easily able to manage the implementation of new approaches for PFS and solve the numerous problems that arose over pilot period were those that dedicated CSE staff to the effort.

A less visible, but very important ingredient of success in implementing Enhanced CSE components in the PFS sites was a high degree of coordination, cooperation and joint problem-solving in each site, both among the various agencies involved in the IV-D system, including the courts, and between the IV-D and other PFS partners (such as employment and training providers). It was particularly notable when child support, employment and training, and peer support administrators were able to identify bottlenecks and barriers and devise and implement cross-agency solutions; not only did people working in these different agencies speak different languages, it was often necessary for the non-CSE partners to help the CSE administrators see their existing procedures through the eyes of noncustodial parents, who were extremely critical of the child support system. Where interagency communication and joint problem-solving was weak, implementation of Enhanced Child Support Enforcement was difficult.

The pilot-stage demonstration highlighted a set of questions about how CSE systems can work better for the unemployed noncustodial parents of children receiving AFDC and whether these parents should be treated differently than other noncustodial parents. For example, the variation in how states handle the fine points of noncustodial parents' ability to pay child support suggests a fundamental question for national child support policy as well as for the PFS Demonstration: What should "ability to pay" mean when noncustodial parents are unemployed? For example, should CSE programs encourage some noncustodial parents to sacrifice their short-term ability to earn and pay support in favor of potentially greater long-term ability, as is implied by the PFS offer of job training? For how long? Should noncustodial parents' self-support needs be taken into account first, before child support is calculated? Should unemployed noncustodial parents be considered able to work and pay if minimum wage jobs are available? Should noncustodial parents' ability to be responsible in other ways than financially be considered?

The PFS experience to date also raises questions about how the CSE system, under current conditions, can "work all cases" including the more difficult AFDC cases and attain the performance required by the federal case processing standards. Also, while the pilot sites got a good start on devising solutions to the problems of expeditious case processing, it is not clear whether doing this for special groups like the PFS target population can be carried out in an environment that also demands IV-D agencies to "work all cases." With the goal of universal obligation and the reality of far less than universal payment, are special policies indicated for noncustodial parents who have the least resources and can most easily evade location with current methods? Should these parents be offered a different quid pro quo than other parents? If so, is a different message about parental responsibility being sent to the noncustodial parents of children receiving public assistance? Are special incentives and/or different methods of working difficult cases needed to overcome the tendency to neglect some AFDC cases?

Another question concerns noncustodial parents' perceptions of their responsibilities and the fairness of the child support enforcement system. The changes instituted in some sites' CSE practices during the pilot phase of PFS, while substantial accomplishments for multi-agency bureaucracies, certainly did not reverse longstanding hostility toward the system. What is the potential for increasing cooperation among low-income noncustodial parents by creating a more responsive system and how far should CSE agencies try to go?

Many of these questions will be illuminated by an experimental test of the Parents' Fair Share model and are already slated for consideration as a research design for a full-scale demonstration is developed. A research agenda that places the PFS implementation experience and outcomes in the context of the very complicated and increasingly pressured child support enforcement system as a whole promises to make an important contribution to this controversial public policy topic.

Endnotes

1. C. Kastner, D. Corriveau, and C. Bayse with K. Sherwood, "Enhanced Child Support Enforcement in the Parents' Fair Share Demonstration," Manpower Demonstration Research Corporation, July 1991. [Back To Text]

2. Currently, only child support enforcement cases in which AFDC is provided or the custodial parent has requested IV-D services are required by federal law to be included in the IV-D system and states have widely varying proportions of their total child support cases in the system. [Back To Text]

3. The number of children under age 18 living with only one parent increased from about 5.3 million in 1970 to about 11 million in 1992, which was a rise from 9 percent of all children under 18 to 21 percent. (Statistical Abstract, 1993, p. 64.) The number of paternity and child support establishments accomplished by states IV-D programs, and the amount of child support collected, have also grown for example, from total collections of $1.047 billion in federal fiscal year 1978 to $6.886 billion in 1991. However, due to the growth in children living with only one parent, the percent of "demographically eligible" families to actually receive child support payments stayed almost constant, rising from 35 percent in 1978 to 37 percent in 1989. See 1993 Green Book, U.S. House of Representatives, Committee on Ways and Means, p. 743.

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4. For an in-depth examination of case processing methods and barriers to success in two counties of a large state, see Dan Bloom with Bridget Dixon, "Child Support Enforcement Process: A Case Study," MDRC Working Papers, Manpower Demonstration Research Corporation, March 1993. [Back To Text]

5. Even when parents are easily located, the steps required to establish paternity and/or child support and enforce support orders are time-consuming and complicated. Other agencies play vital roles in the establishment and enforcement process and working cases ultimately might entail public attorneys filing the necessary legal complaints against noncustodial parents, court administrators docketing cases for hearings, service of process (personally delivering official papers) by a sheriff or other designated officer of the court, and confirmation from AFDC staff at the time of a hearing that the custodial parent is receiving assistance. [Back To Text]

6. Seventy-four percent reported having been arrested since their 16th birthday. These high figures suggest that the enrollees may have included in their positive responses actions against them in the civil process of child support enforcement. For example, it is very likely to feel like an arrest and conviction when a judge issues a bench warrant, a noncustodial parent is picked up by a uniformed officer of the court and held until arraignment, and then required to go before a judge and either make a "purge payment" or receive a jail sentence. [Back To Text]

7. For MDRC's collection of baseline data on the PFS enrollees, the men were asked to report about a "target child," defined as the youngest child for which the enrollee was behind on child support payments. One-third of the PFS enrollees reported having only one child; 62 percent reported having one or two children. [Back To Text]

8. A noncustodial parent with a monthly child support obligation of $100 per child for two children could easily build up such a debt in a year of unemployment if he had also been determined responsible for birth-related medical expenses ("confinement costs"). [Back To Text]

9. Child support paid in relation to ordered amounts about half among the PFS parents who paid any support in the pre-referral period is close to the national average. [Add 1989 CPS figure and reference.] [Back To Text]

10. By the standard of total dollars of child support collected -- one of the usual measures of IV-D agency performance -- this site, a county, ranked ahead of 24 states in 1990. (For 1990 state collections data, see 1991 Green Book, U.S. House of Representatives, Committee on Ways and Means.) The county's ratio of total child support collected to IV-D administrative costs in 1990 was 10.54:1, which placed it ahead of all 50 states. [Back To Text]

11. These threshold income amounts range from about $400 to $870 gross income per month, except Tennessee's, which is $100 gross income per month. [Back To Text]

12. Some unemployed noncustodial parents may have had income from unemployment insurance benefits or other sources that enabled them to continue to pay child support after being referred to PFS. [Back To Text]

13. The median state AFDC benefit (at the maximum allowed) for a family of three in January 1992 was $372. See 1992 Green Book, U.S. House of Representatives, Committee on Ways and Means, p. 645. [Back To Text]

14. See F. Furstenberg, K. Sherwood, and M. Sullivan, Caring and Paying: What Fathers and Mothers Say About Child Support, MDRC, 1992. [Back To Text]

15. There is also a Minnesota state law that requires to check with CSE about all their new hired employees to ensure that wage withholding can be instituted quickly. A similar policy has been recommendations for the IV-D program nationwide. [Back To Text]

16. Because the IV-D program is often county-administered, as is the legal system governing domestic relations, the Parents' Fair Share pilot-phase demonstration actually included 11 separate CSE systems with two counties each making up the Minnesota and Ohio sites. [Back To Text]

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