Child Support Enforcement

Although all states except New York plan to have procedures in place by January for the immediate withholding of noncustodial parents' wages for child support as required by the Family Support Act of 1988, current data are too sparse to indicate how effective the procedures will be in increasing support collections. Most states have made substantial progress in implementing immediate wage withholding for child support orders. Without further direction from the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), however, many states may fail to designate a public agency to administer immediate wage withholding by the 1994 deadline. Also, states that have not yet implemented immediate wage withholding could benefit from HHS' prompt release of its mandated study of that subject.

GAO found that: (1) all states, except New York, have or expect to have immediate wage withholding (IWW) procedures in place by January 1, 1994; (2) the most common practice used to privately enforce IWW outside the Title IV-D child support enforcement system requires the parents' private attorneys to petition the court to issue a child support order providing for IWW; (3) although most states have or plan to have a designated public agency to track and monitor IWW payments, 12 states have not designated an enforcement agency, and one state is uncertain about how IWW will be administered; (4) states have adopted various IWW opt-out provisions as part of their implementation of IWW in non-Title IV-D child support cases; (5) although implementation of IWW for non-Title IV-D child support cases has had little impact on federal and state budgets, state child support systems, and the courts, its effectiveness in increasing child support collections is unknown; (6) small businesses have complained about the additional administrative burden placed upon them because they do not have automated payroll systems that can easily accommodate the task of withholding and forwarding child support payments; and (7) large employers have expressed concerns about the lack of standardization among court orders, missing or incomplete information on court orders, and conflicting orders for the same noncustodial parent.

Recommendations

Our recommendations from this work are listed below with a Contact for more information. Status will change from "In process" to "Open," "Closed - implemented," or "Closed - not implemented" based on our follow up work.

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