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October 2004 - Vol. 6, No. 8
 Please
Note: As of July 1, 2004, we have changed our name! The Center
on Fathers, Families and Public Policy is now The Center for Family
Policy and Practice.
OCSE Releases 2005-2009 Strategic
Plan for Child Support Enforcement
The U.S. Office of Child Support Enforcement (OCSE) has issued
its five-year strategic plan which outlines the department’s
guiding principles, goals and strategies for collecting child support
in the coming years. The plan provides both insight into the department’s
priorities and a standard toward which states should be working.
Emphasis (italics) has been added on some points. Among the notable
goals and objectives in the plan:
- Indicators for measuring the goal “All Children in IV-D
Cases Have Medical Coverage” include “The percentage
of IV-D cases (excluding arrears-only cases) with medical coverage
from any source,” (emphasis added) and “Medicaid
cost savings attributed to Medicaid eligible children in the IV-D
caseload covered by private insurance or receiving cash medical
support”. This method for meeting the goal of medical coverage
could result in an increased emphasis on charging a monthly insurance
fee to noncustodial parents who do not have health insurance through
employment. A strategy related to this goal is to “develop
information about low-cost health insurance available at the local
level.” See below for further information on the likelihood
that noncustodial parents will be increasingly charged for Medicaid
and State Children's Health Insurance Program (SCHIP) health coverage
for their children.
- Strategies for the coming years include:
- Intervene early to modify orders, correcting mismatches
between ordered payments and ability to pay.
- Leverage debt, relieving uncollectible debt owed to
the State, or to the custodial parent (obligee) with
obligee’s permission, in return for regular, reliable
payment of current support.
- Communicate with parents about child support payments early
and consistently. Phone calls initiated by child support staff
to explain procedures are vital to ensuring that parents are
treated justly.
- Prepare state decision-makers to make decisions about increasing
pass-through of child support to families receiving public
assistance and distribute collections to families who
formerly received assistance.
- Address perceived obstacles to payment, including access
to children, matters of procedural justice, and affordability
of orders.
- Develop targeted, specific initiatives to deal with special
populations, including incarcerated or formerly incarcerated
parents.
- Increase use of sanctions for noncooperating parents. (Note:
This refers to sanctioning welfare recipients who are custodial
parents off of assistance when they do not cooperate with
child support, such as helping to find the noncustodial parent.
Noncustodial parents can also be sanctioned off of Food Stamps
for failing to make child support payments.)
- Increase the use of expedited and administrative processes,
with recourse to courts to ensure that parents receive
procedural justice.
The plan, National Child Support Enforcement Strategic Plan,
is available at http://www.acf.hhs.gov/programs/cse/.
Report Identifies Potential Impact of TANF Reauthorization
on Domestic Violence
The Center for Law and Social Policy (CLASP) has issued a summary
of the provisions contained in both the House and Senate versions
of the TANF reauthorization bills that could have an impact on victims
of domestic violence and their families. Among the key points:
- Additional work requirements in both bills would require TANF
families to engage in work upon receipt of TANF, eliminating the
current 24-month period during which states are not mandated to
require families to work. Instead, both bills require that a self-sufficiency
plan be developed within 60 days of TANF receipt. States that
have adopted the Family Violence Option (FVO) have relief from
meeting the work requirements for domestic violence victims (see
report for further details about the current hardship exemptions
and the FVO), but it is not clear how the FVO and the stricter
work requirements would interact and how this might affect families
that are vulnerable to domestic violence.
- The report includes a chart that clearly demonstrates the distinctions
between provisions in the House and Senate reauthorization bills
as they relate to domestic violence services that would or would
not be countable and allowable under the increased work participation
requirements proposed in each bill.
- Both bills would amend the purposes of TANF with regard to marriage
and fatherhood. They would change the 4th purpose, “to encourage
the formation and maintenance of two-parent families,” to
“to encourage the formation and maintenance of healthy two-parent
married families, and encourage responsible fatherhood,”
and would provide significant new funding for marriage promotion
activities.
- The Senate bill includes “modest” domestic violence
safeguards, but the House bill does not address the issue of domestic
violence. Neither bill provides funding specifically intended
to identify or address domestic violence or training that could
help to contend with domestic violence among participants in marriage
promotion activities.
- Both bills authorize, but do not include in the reauthorization’s
allotment, funding for new fatherhood demonstration programs and
media campaigns. Both fatherhood program proposals include language
on domestic violence. The House bill would require grant applicants
to “assess for the presence of, and intervene to resolve,
domestic violence and child abuse and neglect.” The Senate
bill would require grantees to “1)consult with experts in
domestic violence or domestic violence coalitions in developing
programs or activities; 2) describe how the programs or activities
will ‘address, as appropriate,’ issues of domestic
violence; and 3) describe what the grantee will do to ensure and
inform participants that their involvement is voluntary.”
The Senate bill also doubles funding for visitation and access
grants from $10 to $20 million by fiscal year 2007.
The authors state that:
Domestic violence advocates have raised serious concerns about
the requirement in the House bill that funded programs assess for
the presence of, and intervene to resolve, domestic violence and
child abuse and neglect, including coordination with state and local
child protective services and domestic violence programs. One concern
is that fatherhood programs will unwittingly encourage increased
contact between fathers and their children’s mothers without
fully appreciating the risk of domestic violence. Another concern
is that fatherhood programs will not have sufficient training or
expertise to understand how best to intervene in domestic violence
situations without consultation with domestic violence experts.
Additionally, there is a concern about potential for inappropriate
coordination with child protection agencies, which can have a chilling
effect on program participation and cooperation.
The report, Safety in the Safety Net: TANF Reauthorization
Provisions Relevant to Domestic Violence, is available at www.clasp.org.
Office of Inspector General Recommends Recovery of
State Childrenís Health Insurance Costs from Noncustodial Parents
In a series of reports, the Office of the Inspector General (OIG),
has investigated the potential savings to seven states if they were
to require noncustodial parents to contribute toward the costs of
SCHIP (health insurance for children who would not qualify for Medicaid)
benefits for their children. The additional payments would be made
to states, not to custodial parents. Currently, noncustodial parents
are required to repay custodial parents for their share of any premiums
paid under the SCHIP program. The OIG investigation was looking
into how much states could save if, on top of their current child
support order and medical support order, noncustodial parents were
required to repay the states’ costs associated with the benefit.
This summary is based in part on the OIG reports and on an analysis
of the studies by Paula Roberts of the Center for Law and Social
Policy (CLASP), OIG Studies on Possible Recoupment of SCHIP
Costs through the Child Support Program.
- Potential payments from the noncustodial parent were calculated
by finding the amount of potential earnings that could be retained
by the state while limited by the federal Consumer Credit Protection
Act to no more than 50% of disposable earnings and allowing for
either an existing state self-support reserve (the amount of income
felt to provide for minimum basic needs) or a reserve set by the
OIG at $700 per month. Additional children were also taken into
account. In other words, as stated in the CLASP analysis, “the
OIG is determining how much of the state’s cost could be
recouped from the noncustodial parent. It assumes that the noncustodial
parent would be required to pay all his/her ‘excess’
income (income above the cash support obligations and a self-support
reserve) toward the state’s SCHIP costs.”
- The federal laws under Title XXI of the Social Security Act,
which funds SCHIP, do not allow for the assignment of medical
support rights. In Texas’ response, it was noted that this
federal law prevented the state’s retention of collected
medical support. The OIG responds to this barrier by stating that
the final report summarizing the results of the seven-state review
will call for legislative changes to the assignment rules that
would allow states to require an assignment of medical support
even when they are funded entirely by Title XXI.
- For each state studied, an estimate of the potential amount
of savings to the state was conducted for children who were eligible
for, but not enrolled in the SCHIP program and for children already
enrolled in the program whose noncustodial parent could have contributed
to the cost of the coverage. The savings, when treated as the
cost to the noncustodial parent, would mean that noncustodial
parent payments for SCHIP would range from $30 per month per child
in Texas to $66 per month per child in North Carolina.
The OIG reports are available at www.oig.hhs.gov.
The CLASP report is available at www.clasp.org.
Studies Document Numbers and Difficulties of Working
Poor Families
Working Hard, Falling Short: America’s Working Families
and the Pursuit of Economic Security, a publication from the
Working Poor Families Project, provides an analysis of the state
of low-income working families. The report is a compilation of national
and state studies and data.
Findings of the national study include:
- One in four working families with children is low-income, defined
for the report as a family of four earning less than $36,784 per
year in 2002. Of the 9.2 million low-income working families,
2.5 million are in poverty, earning less that $18,392 for a family
of four. Connecticut and Massachusetts have the lowest percentage
of low-income working families, less than 15 percent. At 40 percent,
Mississippi has the highest rate.
- Minority working families are twice as likely to be low-income
as families with white parents. In seven states, more than half
of minority working families are low-income.
- Thirty-seven percent of low-income working families have at
least one parent without any health insurance. Texas has the highest
rate of uninsured working poor families at 50 percent, and Wisconsin
has the lowest at just over 10 percent.
- In 2002, one in five U.S. jobs paid less than $8.84 per hour,
a poverty-level wage for a family of four.
- In 1968, a full-time worker earning minimum wage had annual
earnings that were 120 percent of the poverty threshold for a
family of three. In 2003, annual earnings at the minimum wage
were only 74 percent of poverty for a family of three.
Several facts from the U.S. Census concerning the working poor
are reported including:
- Seventy-one percent of low-income families work.
- The average annual work effort for low-income working families
is 2,500 hours, equal to 1.2 full-time jobs.
- Fifty-three percent of low-income working families are headed
by a married couple.
Increased federal leadership to improve earnings for working families
is called for by the authors, based on two primary observations:
- Enormous disparities exist between states with regard to eligibility
for programs such as Pell grant supplements for students and health
insurance eligibility.
- Combined federal and state spending is far short of the need
on many programs important to supporting higher earnings for families.
The report is available at www.aecf.org/initiatives/jobsinitiative/workingpoor.htm.
A second report on the poverty of women in the United States, finding
that women in the labor force are 40 percent more likely than men
to be poor and analyzing the U.S. Census data on poverty among women
is available at www.legalmomentum.org/womeninpoverty.pdf.
Update on Prison and Jail Inmates
The Child Trends Data Bank has released an overview of data on
incarcerated young adults. Among its findings:
- Among the estimated 750,700 males ages 18 to 29 who were incarcerated
in 2003, 46 percent were black males.
- Among black male high school dropouts ages 20 to 35, more were
in custody than in paid employment on an average day in 1996.
- In 2003, among young adult males ages 20 to 24, 11.3 percent
of black males were incarcerated, 3.6 percent of Hispanic males
and 1.6 percent of white males were incarcerated.
- Up to one-third of youth are reincarcerated within a few years
after release.
- Factors associated with ceasing to engage in criminal behavior
in young adulthood include employment, marriage, parenthood, job
stability, and high school graduation.
The report, Young Adults in Jail or Prison, is available
at www.childtrendsdatabank.org. |
