Child-Support Crackdown -- State Gets Tough On Non-Paying Parents; Families Reap The Benefits

Getting hel The Office of Support Enforcement may be reached at 464-7020 during office hours.

Cate Homer got off welfare last month, no thanks to the fathers of her two sons.

"If both daddies paid the child support they were supposed to pay, we wouldn't have had to go on welfare," said Homer, 31, who hadn't seen a child-support check for either her 4-year-old or 11-year-old until recently.

Homer, now employed as a nurse, said her older son's father started paying child support in July only because the state Office of Support Enforcement caught up with him.

Once, Homer would have been alone in her attempts to wring support payments from the fathers of her children.

But over the past year, the state Office of Support Enforcement has gotten tough with nonsupporters. That effort is getting results, lessening the burden on taxpayers as well as on single parents.

In two years, the state's success rate in collecting child support has almost doubled.

In June, the state had a 33.1 percent collection rate for single parents receiving welfare that month, said Dave Hogan, director of the Office of Support Enforcement. That's almost twice the 17.8 percent collection rate for January 1989.

For clients not on welfare, the collection rate was 55.1 percent in June, compared with 31.5 percent in January 1989.

"We've come a long ways in 2 1/2 years," Hogan said.

Of 1.26 million children in the state, 280,000 live with a single parent, according to the 1990 U.S. census. Most of those children were entitled to child support in 1990, said Kathy Reents, of the Association for Children for Enforcement of Support (ACES).

Nationally, nine out of 10 children on welfare are owed child support, Reents said.

Children's financial well-being drops dramatically when they live with a single parent. Single-mother households pull in only one-fourth of the income of two-parent households, and single-father households make half, according to a 1989 national study.

Not only do some children lack money for nutritious meals, but they can also suffer psychological trauma from the financial struggle between their parents.

"The child's psyche is being ripped apart," said George A. Parks, psychology research associate at the University of Washington.

The Office of Support Enforcement sends wage-withholding notices to the noncustodial parent's employer, who may then withhold as much as 50 percent of a paycheck for child support.

Last year, the agency started sending notices to all employers, even if the parent had not been delinquent on child-support payments.

The state office also can seize the assets of an unemployed person who has avoided paying child support, although it's difficult to find parents who move often, said Janet Wallace, deputy administrator of the Office of Support Enforcement.

The agency can also take money from unemployment checks.

To track down more nonpayers, Washington state last year began a reporting program for industries that employ temporary workers, said Roberto Swain, public-affairs specialist for the Office of Support Enforcement.

The agency asks businesses such as construction firms to report new hires within 30 days, he said.

"It seems like a lot of people don't run anymore" because they know the agency will catch up with them, Swain said.

Since the program's start last July, 18,005 employers have sent reports, resulting in 10,537 matches with cases at the Office of Support Enforcement, Swain said. Employers who do not send reports may be fined $200 a month.

Once a noncustodial parent gets caught for not paying child support, he or she is charged with back payments to reimburse Aid for Dependent Children money.

But current state and federal laws don't address the biggest problem in enforcement - noncustodial parents who are self-employed, Reents said. They can avoid paying child support by manipulating their revenue reports to show they can't afford to pay.

One single mother on welfare said her former husband has dodged the child-support enforcement office for nine years.

"When they do catch him, he quits his job," she said. "It's really hard to support three kids on your own."

Bob Hoyden, spokesman for Parents Opposed to Punitive Support (POPS) in Olympia, said that many men feel a 50 percent bite out of their paychecks could wipe them out financially. "If rates were lower, there no doubt would be more compliance," Hoyden said. "We want them to pay child support, but we say that the rates . . . don't give them an opportunity to get on with their lives."

Perhaps those with the most to lose in the child-support conflict are children traumatized by the struggle between their parents.

Mothers with custody often feel that the father should be financially responsible for the children. Fathers feel that the mother has turned the children against them - they don't want to support a family hostile to them, said Parks of the UW.

"Children are caught in the crossfire," he said.