Paperless Child Support Payments May Cost Poor Fathers Only Source Of Income

Found via Reddit. Now that is fucked up. But first of all, keep that in mind:

This 2004 study by the Office of Child Support Enforcement shows that, according to their figures, 63% of all people who are behind on their child support report earning less than $10,000 per year. That accounts for 70% of all the child support owed in this country. The same figures show that 34% of child support obligors report earning no money at all during the year.
84% of non-custodial parents are fathers
Sanford Braver found that, when obligors who had lost their job were removed from the database, between 80% and 100% of child support was paid in full and on time. - Source

Now, when we talk about deadbeat dads, this mostly means deadbroke dads. To make matters worse, this is what could happen soon:

Old child support debts could cost thousands of poor men their only income next year because of a policy aimed at reducing the cost to the government of mailing paper checks to pay federal benefits.

The Treasury Department will start paying benefits electronically next March. It will stop issuing the paper checks that many people rely on to safeguard a portion of their benefits from states trying to collect back child support.

States can freeze the bank accounts of people who owe child support. A separate Treasury Department rule, in place since last May in a preliminary form, guarantees them the power to freeze Social Security, disability and veterans' benefits that have been deposited into those accounts.

Once paper checks are eliminated, about 275,000 people could lose access to all of their income, advocates say.

[...]

In many cases, the bills are decades old and the children long grown. Much of the money owed is interest and fees that add up when men are unable to pay because they are disabled, institutionalized or imprisoned.

Most of the money will go to governments, not to the children of the men with child support debts, independent analyses show. States are allowed to keep child support money as repayment for welfare previously provided for those children.

In some instances, the grown children are supporting their fathers.

The rule change illustrates how a politically desirable goal like cracking down on so-called deadbeat dads can have complicated, even counterproductive, effects in practice.

We see this happen again and again and again where they make it harder and harder on these deadbeat dads and make life worse for poor men. Be it imprisoning them, taking their driver's license, not allowing them to leave the country, not paying them a defense attorney on hearings, interest fees etc. It has long stopped to make sense as most measurements do not actually help the fathers to pay.

People who owe large amounts of child support are almost universally poor. Among those owing $30,000 or more, three-fourths had no reported income or income of less than $10,000, HHS says. Many had their earnings interrupted by disability or jail time and are unlikely to repay the child support debt, the government-sponsored research says.

The usual methods of collecting back child support often don't work with the poor. States typically start by garnishing wages. If that doesn't work, they can suspend driver's licenses, revoke passports and take away professional credentials.

Those measures have little effect on poor people without jobs who rely on federal benefits. They have no wages to garnish and no passports. Many can't afford a car and do not need a driver's license.

State child support agencies echo the HHS view that child support enforcement should not be so draconian that people end up with nothing.

Child support, deadbeat moms and debtors prison

Starting point is a Dr. Helen post. I'll jump straight to the data:

A person being in arrears on child support payments is not unusual: in 2008, 11.2 million U.S. child support cases had arrears due.[1] The number of persons kept in jail or in prison for child support arrears is not generally tracked. Based on a publicly available collection of relevant data, an estimated 50,000 persons are kept in jail or in person [sic]on any given day in the U.S. for child support arrears.[2] Hence Turner v. Rogers does not merely concern a technical question of legal procedure. Being in arrears on child support payments is a situation that many persons experience. Moreover, as a result of child support debt, many persons in the U.S. are being imprisoned.

[1] - U.S. Office of Child Support Enforcement, FY 2008 Annual Report to Congress, Table 73.
[2] - Galbi, Douglas. "Persons in Jail or in Prison for Child-Support Debt," published Mar. 22, 2011.r

And a comparison between "deadbeat" dads / moms:

Census figures show only 57 percent of moms required to pay child support -- 385,000 women out of a total of 674,000 -- give up some or all of the money they owe. That leaves some 289,000 "deadbeat" mothers out there, a fact that has barely been reported in the media.

That compares with 68 percent of dads who pay up, according to the figures.

[...]men also still pay much more in child support. The Census Bureau last month also released numbers showing fathers paid an average of $3,000 to custodial moms in 1997. Women paid little over half that. Moms also get about 60 percent of what they are owed, whereas dads only get 48 percent.

Not only are the dads paying up more when they don’t have custody, but when the court does hand the kids over to dads, they work more than moms who have custody.

While 7 percent of custodial moms work more than 44 hours a week, 24.5 percent of single custodial dads work more than 44 hours. And only about half as many custodial dads get government help than moms.

U.S. Census Child Support Figures

Via Glenn Sacks:

While we’re on the subject, it’s worth noting that the U.S. Census Bureau came out with the latest child support figures earlier this month. The most recent data here are for 2009.

The good news is that the number of custody orders with dads as the custodial parent has rocketed skyward. In 2007, they were only 16.2% of the total; in 2009 17.8% of parents with custody orders were dads. At that rate it’ll only be 20 years before we reach equality in child custody. Break out the champagne.

What’s also true is that, even though they’re ordered to pay more than mothers, fathers do a lot better job of doing so. Fathers are ordered to pay, on average, $5,997 per year whereas mothers are only ordered to pay $5,601. Despite being ordered to pay more, fathers pay 62.8% of the ordered amount while mothers pay 54.6%. And 42% of custodial mothers receive all of what they’re owed, while only 34.1% of fathers do.

NOW wants to imprison more poor fathers...

Sensationalist headline....I know, but hear me out. Some quotes about "deadbeat" dads via Glenn's blog:

More than 90 percent of fathers with joint custody paid the support due, according to a Census Bureau report (Series P-23, No. 173). So deadbeats are in the minority. Also, most so-called deadbeat dads actually are dead broke. Two-thirds of men who fail to make child-support payments earn poverty-level wages, according to the Federal Office of Child Support Enforcement. Most of the others are unemployed...
The largest federally funded study of child-support payments was led by Arizona State University researcher Sanford Braver over an eight-year period. Mr. Braver found that fathers with joint custody pay 90.2 percent of all child support ordered. Fathers with visitation rights pay 79.1 percent of all child support ordered. However, fathers with no access or visitation rights to their children pay just 44.5 percent of the court-ordered child support. Much of Mr. Braver's data was backed up in the Census Bureau report (Series P-23, No. 173).
Another study, "Visitational Interference: A National Study" by J. Annette Vanini and Edward Nichols, found that 77 percent of noncustodial fathers are not able to spend time with their children, as ordered by the court, as a result of "visitation interference" perpetuated by the custodial parent. This would mean that noncompliance with court-ordered visitation is three times the problem of noncompliance with court-ordered child support. In short, lousy moms outnumber deadbeat dads 3-1. - from here
[...]
This 2004 study by the Office of Child Support Enforcement shows that, according to their figures, 63% of all people who are behind on their child support report earning less than $10,000 per year. That accounts for 70% of all the child support owed in this country. The same figures show that 34% of child support obligors report earning no money at all during the year.
84% of non-custodial parents are fathers
Sanford Braver found that, when obligors who had lost their job were removed from the database, between 80% and 100% of child support was paid in full and on time. - from here
[...]
By federal law, child support orders cannot be retroactively modified, no matter how mistaken, misguided or ridiculous. Even men who fell behind on their child support because they had heart attacks, broken legs or cancer cannot have their arrearages eliminated. And much of the arrearages owed by Abbott’s “Top 10” accrued before 2002, when Texas charged obligors 12% interest, one of the highest interest rates in the country.
Also, under Texas law, an obligor who owes only three months of past-due child support can have his driver’s license or other professional licenses suspended, interfering with his ability make a living.
Federal Office of Child Support Enforcement data shows that two-thirds of those behind on child support nationwide earned poverty-level wages; less than four percent of the national child support debt is owed by those earning $40,000 or more a year. - from here
[...]

A 2007 study by the Urban Institute showed that eighteen states routinely charge interest and those states have seen their arrears increase from $5.4 billion to $58.7 billion over a 10-year period. States that did not charge interest over that same period only saw arrears grow from $2.8 billion to $19.5 billion during the same time period. - from here
[...]

a few weeks ago, the State of New Jersey conducted a statewide sweep of those behind on their child support payments. Hundreds of people were picked up and given a choice - pay up or go to jail. Most of us would pay if we could, but what New Jersey actually collected in that sweep was six cents on the dollar. In one county, it was two cents. Stated another way, when faced with paying what they owed or going to jail, six parents in 100 paid. - from here
[...]

every dollar of child support collected by the state is matched by $0.66 from the federal government. - from here
[...]

even the Office of Child Support Enforcement admits that family court judges routinely order support levels that the non-custodial parent can't pay.

we care so much about the wellbeing of children that we take their fathers from them and put them in prison. That's sensible only if you believe that fathers have nothing to offer children except money. And that, come to think of it, is a pretty fair description of public policy with regard to fathers and children.

The sensible approach to all of this is equally shared parenting in which parents have equal time with children and share the expenses of childcare equally. But until we get there, family courts must (a) start establishing support orders that parents can actually pay, (b) start enforcing visitation orders (that's the main cause of refusal to pay), and (c) establish summary procedures for child support modification that reflect changed circumstances.

Oh, and (d) only send people to prison who can pay but don't. - from here
 [...]

According to a September 2006 issue of “Children’s Voice” magazine, while the government spends some $4 billion on child support enforcement, it spends only $10 million on visitation enforcement. In essence, we spend 400 times more on child support enforcement than we do visitation enforcement. - from here
[...]

According to an Urban Institute study, less than one in 20 non-custodial parents who suffer substantial income drops are able to get courts to reduce their child support payments.

According to a California Judicial Council report, 80% of California child support debtors earn poverty level wages, and over a quarter of the arrears total is interest. - from here
[...]

In reality, much if not most child support enforcement funds are frittered away in misguided attempts to collect artificially inflated paper arrearages from low-income men who couldn’t possibly pay them. Federal Office of Child Support Enforcement data shows that two-thirds of those behind on child support nationwide earned less than $10,000 in the previous year; less than four percent of the overall national child support debt is owed by those earning $40,000 or more a year. According to the largest federally-funded study of divorced dads ever conducted, unemployment, not willful neglect, is the largest cause of failure to pay child support.

For example, a recent Urban Institute study found that only 25% of California's $14.4 billion child support arrearage will be collected over the next decade because the support amounts demanded of noncustodial parents are not realistic. The average arrears owed per debtor is $3,000 higher than the median annual earnings of employed child support debtors. Those in the poorest category have a child support debt amounting to their full net income for seven and a half years. - from here

Even though I repeated myself I want you to keep that all in your mind. Most fathers pay child support. If they are not able to pay this is most likely due to unemployment. If they are unemployed they face the problem that the child support payment rates don't get reduced, even more so, the state ads another 66 cent for every dollar not payed and puts the fathers in prison if they can not pay. Most of those earn poverty level wages, or are unemployed and can surely not pay while they are in prison, so there is even more to pay. Not even thinking about the felony or possible revoked drivers licences which makes it even harder to pay at all. This of course doesn't help children.

Now we come to NOW, more specifically the Rhodes Island chapter:

RI NOW Supports
Promoting Economic Justice
S0023
Would decrease the amount of child support arrearage constituting a felony from $10,000 to $5,000
H5411
Would decrease the amount of child support arrearage constituting a felony from $10,000 to $5,000

And there is nothing more to say...

Deadbeat dads...

I am a tad surprised that I didn't cite that article before:

In the past decade, child-support collections from the estimated 11 million fathers who do not live with their children have nearly doubled, to more than $18 billion a year. Most of that money comes from fathers who have stable jobs and can afford to pay.

Where the money does not come from is the 2.5 million poor noncustodial fathers in the United States. According to a study by the Urban Institute, nearly 30 percent of these men are in prison. Among the remainder, nearly half are unemployed. Those who do have jobs earn an average of $5,600 a year, well below the poverty line.

[...]

Poor fathers are often asked to pay significantly more, as a percentage of their income, than middle- class fathers, according to the Manpower Demonstration Research Corporation, a social policy research group that studied 5,500 low-income fathers in seven cities in the 1990's. Nearly two-thirds of the poor fathers tracked by the study had child support orders that demanded more than half of their income.

I always wondered how many dads exactly have been put behind bars for not being able to pay. The Zetamale linked us to an article that gave us a number (for South Carolina at least):

South Carolina is one of those states that does not provide a lawyer for indigent parents facing prison for nonpayment, [...] in South Carolina, 13 percent of the county jail population consists of nonpaying parents held in civil contempt, and 98 percent of them did not have lawyers.

And justice for all, well at least for those that can afford having a lawyer...