• Introduction
• CSE Caseload
• Paternity Establishment
• Establishment of Child Support Orders
• CSE Collections
CSE Collections
• Child Support Collected on Behalf of TANF Families
• Collections on Current Support Obligations and Arrearage Payments
• CSE Administrative Expenditures
• Cost-Effectiveness of the CSE Program
• Conclusion

Figures

Conclusion

The Child Support Enforcement (CSE) program is a federal/state program that promotes self-sufficiency of families in which one of the biological parents is living outside of the home by ensuring2015

Summary

In FY1978, families who received cash welfare comprised 85% of the CSE caseload and 45% of CSE collections. By FY2015. By FY2003, they comprised only 1710.5% of the CSE caseload and 95% of CSE collections. In FY2003, former cash welfare recipients comprised 47% of the CSE caseload and 40% of CSE collections. Families that had never received cash welfare comprised 36% of the CSE caseload and almost 52% of CSE collections. This is consistent withUsing a more recent classification of the CSE caseload, in FY2015 current Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) families and Title IV-E foster care families comprised 10.5% of the CSE caseload and 3% of collections, and former TANF families and Title IV-E foster care families comprised 42.8% of the CSE caseload and 31% of collections. Families that had never received TANF or Title IV-E foster care comprised 46.7% of the CSE caseload and almost 66% of collections. This reflects the underlying premise of the CSE program: as child support becomes a more consistent and stable income source/support, former cash welfare families will nevernot have to return to the cash welfare rolls, and families that never resorted to cash welfare will nevernot have to do so. In FY2015In FY2003, the CSE caseload was comprised of 15.914.7 million families. The CSE program is estimated to handle about 60% of all child support cases; the remaining cases are handled by private attorneys, by collection agencies, or through mutual agreements between the parents. All of the data in this report are exclusively CSE program data.

Before a state can enforce/collect a child support obligation, paternity must be determined and a child support order must be established. During the period FY1999-FY2003FY2011-FY2015, the number of paternities established or acknowledged fell 512% nationwide, from nearly 1.71.6 million to 1.5 million. During the period FY1998-FY2002that same period, the number of cases with a child support order established dropped 21% nationwide, from 11.512.8 million to 11.312.6 million.

The CSE program is a program of paradoxes. The CSE program only collected 18characterized by paradoxes. It collected only 20% of the child support obligations for which it had responsibility in FY2003FY2015 (i.e., 5865% of all current collections and 7% of obligations that were past- due). ButHowever, during the period FY1999-FY2003,FY2015 child support payments collected by CSE agencies increased 33% for the nation as a whole80% nationally, from $15.9 billion to $21.228.6 billion. Child support collections have continued to increase even though the CSE caseload has declined. Although the number and percentpercentage of CSE cases with collections have been increasing over time, the average monthly child support payment for families that actually receive a paymentone has been decreasing and is relatively small, amounting to only $221$264 per month in FY2003. Although states incurred a cost of $355 million for the CSE program in FY2003 and the federal government incurred a cost of almost $2.3 billion, $4.33FY2015. Although the national cost of the CSE program was $5.7 billion in FY2015, $5.26 in child support was collected for every $1 spent on CSE activities. The CSE program began as a welfare cost-recovery program; however, in FY2003, 90FY2015 93% of CSE collections went to CSE families (rather than the federal government or the states); the comparable figure in FY1979 was no more than 56%. This report will not be updated.

Introduction

The Child Support Enforcement (CSE) program (Title IV-D of the Social Security Act) was enacted in January 1975 (P.L. 93-647). The CSE program is a federal/state program that promotesis designed to promote self-sufficiency of families in which one of the biological parents is living outside of the home by ensuring. The program achieves its mission by trying to ensure that noncustodial parents meet their financial responsibility to their children. WhileStates are responsible for administering the CSE program (directly or through local CSE agencies and family or domestic courts), but the federal government plays an important role in setting program standards and policy, evaluating state performance, anda major role in dictating the primary design features of state programs, funding state and local programs, monitoring and evaluating state programs, providing technical assistance, and giving direct assistance to states in locating absent parents and obtaining child support payments.

The CSE program was created by Congress in 1974 with two primary goals: (1) reducing public expenditures for actual and potential welfare recipients by obtaining ongoing support from noncustodial parents (i.e., welfare cost-recovery), and (2) establishing paternity for children born outside of marriage so that child support could be obtained. The December 1974 Senate Finance Committee report on the CSE legislation stated, "The problem of welfare in the United States is, to a considerable extent, a problem of the non-support of children by their absent parents."¹ It also stated that the result of a new federal-state CSE program would be to lower welfare costs to the taxpayer and to deter fathers from abandoning their families. The CSE program (Title IV-D of the Social Security Act) was enacted in January 1975 (P.L. 93-647).

All 50 states, the District of Columbia, Guam, Puerto Rico, and the Virgin Islands operate CSE programs and are entitled to federal matching funds.² For every dollar a state spends on CSE expenditures, it generally receives 66 cents from the federal government. To qualify for federal matching funds, each state's CSE plan must be approved by the Office of Child Support Enforcement (OCSE), Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). States also are eligible to receive incentive payments, based on certain performance indicators. The CSE program provides seven major services on behalf of children: parent location, paternity establishment, establishment of child support orders, review and modification of support orders, collection of support payments, distribution of support payments, and establishment and enforcement of medical support. CSE services are provided to both welfare and non-welfare families.

3 Since 1975, the federal administration of the CSE program has been in the OCSE, which was originally located in the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW), renamed the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) in 1979. From the beginning, the OCSE has been required by law to review and approve state CSE plans, establish standards for effective state CSE programs, provide technical assistance to the states, assist them with reporting procedures, maintain records of program operations and child support expenditures and collections, audit state CSE programs, and prepare and submit an annual report to Congress. The annual report to Congress has always included collection, expenditure, and caseload data. In fact,; Section 452(a)(10) of the Social Security Act stipulates that certain data must be included in the annual report.

In March 2004, the CSE program was cited by the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) as being the most cost-effective program among all social services and block grant/formula programs reviewed government-wide.¹ In FY2003, $21.2 billion was collected at a combined federal/state cost of $5.2 billion. Thus, in effect, four dollars in child support was collected for every dollar spent. While the extensive reforms made to the CSE program in 1996, 1997, and 1998 have helped to significantly improve child support collections and the number of paternities established, the CSE program has since its beginning in 1975 been a highly respected and valuable program which has made much

The CSE program provides seven major services on behalf of children: parent location, paternity establishment, establishment of child support orders, review and modification of support orders, collection of support payments, distribution of support payments, and establishment and enforcement of medical support. CSE services are provided to both welfare and nonwelfare families. Collection methods used by state CSE agencies include income withholding;⁴ intercept of federal and state income tax refunds; intercept of unemployment compensation; liens against property; reporting child support obligations to credit bureaus; intercept of lottery winnings; sending insurance settlement information to CSE agencies; authority to withhold or suspend driver's licenses, professional licenses, and recreational and sporting licenses of persons who owe past-due support; and authority to seize assets of debtor parents held by public or private retirement funds and financial institutions. Moreover, federal law authorizes the Secretary of State to deny, revoke, or restrict passports of debtor parents. All jurisdictions also have civil or criminal contempt-of-court procedures and criminal nonsupport laws, and federal criminal penalties may be imposed in certain cases. Federal law also requires states to enact and implement the Uniform Interstate Family Support Act (UIFSA) and expand full faith and credit procedures, and it provides for international enforcement of child support.⁵

Many commentators agree that the mission of the CSE program has changed over the years. It began as a welfare cost-recovery program, but the Child Support Enforcement Amendments of 1984 (P.L. 98-378) broadened the mission to reflect service delivery.⁶ The criteria for making incentive payments to the states waswere broadened in 1984 to include collections for non-welfarenonwelfare families. Some commentators assert the service-delivery goal was reemphasized in 1996 legislation, which established the "family first" policy. To help assureensure that former welfare recipients stay off the TANF rolls,²Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF)⁷ rolls, the "family first" policy requires that such families are to receive any child support arrearage payments collected by the state before the state and federal governments retain their shareshares of collections.³ 8 Reforms enacted in 2006 (P.L. 109-171) extended the "family first" policy by providing incentives to states to encourage them to allow more child support to go to both former welfare families and families still on welfare. Additionally, the sharp decline in the cash welfare rolls and reduced expenditures on cash welfare since the mid-1990s helped shift the program from recovering declining costs for a smaller population to collecting and paying child support to nonwelfare families.

For the past 2032 years (since the 1984 Amendmentsamendments), the CSE program and major changes or modifications to it have consistently had bipartisan congressional support. Child support proposals that were introduced in the 106^th, 107^th, and 108^th Congresses, and that have been reintroduced in the 109^th Congress, seek to fully implement a "family first" policy by ensuring that more of the child support collected on behalf of TANF families go to the family, and that all of the child support collected on behalf of former-TANF families go to the family. In addition, the proposed legislation has included additional child support collection methods/enforcement techniques to ensure that noncustodial parents of all children are made to be financially responsible for their children. These CSE proposals are broadly supported but generally have been incorporated into the controversial welfare reauthorization legislation, and therefore have not yet passed both houses of Congress. (See CRS Issue Brief IB10140, Welfare Reauthorization: Overview of the Issues.)

Table 1 presents a summary of child support program statistics for the nation as a whole over a 25-year time span. Between FY1978 and FY2003, child

This report examines CSE caseload, collection, and expenditure data over the period FY1978-FY2015 (FY1978 is the first year of complete data and the data for FY2015 are the most recent available). It also presents more detailed data on collections, expenditures, paternity establishment, child support order establishment, cost-effectiveness, and program financing impacts on the federal government and the states for various years during the period. All of the tables in this report are based on data from OCSE, obtained from the OCSE website. The information is taken from state-submitted reports on program status sent to OCSE quarterly for financial data and annually for statistical data. Readers should note that the 38-year trend data for CSE collections and caseload have been disaggregated into two categories: TANF cases and non-TANF cases. Before 1997, TANF cases were Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) cases and non-TANF cases were non-AFDC cases.⁹ In FY1999, OCSE started classifying the CSE caseload into three categories—current TANF assistance, former TANF assistance, and never TANF assistance. Also, note that the tables that display TANF cases, collections, or expenditures include Title IV-E foster care cases as well, even though they may not labeled as such.¹⁰

Figure 1 graphically shows CSE collections and expenditures over the 25-year period from FY1978-FY2003. The CSE program is estimated to handle about 60% of all child support cases; the remaining cases are handled by private attorneys, collection agencies, or through mutual agreements between the parents. All of the data in this report are exclusively CSE program data.

Figure 1. Child Support Enforcement Program: Collections and Expenditures: FY1978-FY2003, Selected Years

Source: Office of Child Support Enforcement, HHS, Annual Reports—selected years. Figure prepared by the Congressional Research Service.

CSE Caseload

Other families must apply for CSE services, and states must charge an application fee that cannot exceed $25. Child support collected on behalf of nonwelfare families goes to the family (usually via a state child support disbursement unit). In addition, P.L. 109-171, effective October 1, 2006, required families who have never been on TANF to pay a $25 annual user fee when child support enforcement efforts on their behalf are successful (i.e., at least $500 annually is collected on their behalf).¹⁵ The CSE program defines a current assistance case as one in which the children are: (1) recipients of cash aid under TANF (Title IV-A of the Social Security Act) or (2) entitled to Foster Care maintenance payments (Title IV-E of the Social Security Act). In addition, the children's support rights have been assigned by a caretaker to the state, and a referral to the state CSE agency has been made. A former assistance case is defined as a caseone in which the children were formerly receiving TANF or foster care services. A never never-assistance case is defined as a caseone in which the children are receiving services under the CSE program, but they are not currently eligible for and have not previously received assistance under TANF or foster care.

Figure 2 shows the trend in the CSE caseload, separated bydifferentiated into TANF cases and non-TANF cases. Table 2 shows that TANF cases comprised 85% of the CSE caseload in FY1978, but dropped to 17% of the caseload in FY2003. By the same token, non-TANF cases represented only about 15% of the CSE caseload in FY1978, and increased to 83% of the caseload in FY2003. Available data show that non-TANF cases increasingly are families that formerly received TANF.

In FY1999, OCSE started reporting data for the following categories: current assistance, former assistance, and never received assistance rather than by It shows a sharp drop in TANF cases between FY1995 and FY2005 and then a slower decline through FY2015. As noted earlier, during the beginning years of the CSE program, AFDC cases were a large part and central focus of the program. After the enactment of P.L. 104-193 (the 1996 welfare reform law), there was a sharp drop in TANF cases overall and thereby TANF cases in the CSE program, given that TANF cases are automatically enrolled in the CSE program. The CSE caseload reached its peak in FY1998 with 19.4 million cases and has steadily fallen, with some fluctuations, since then. Even though TANF cases declined steadily after welfare reform, the number of children born to unmarried women did not reach its peak until 2008. Moreover, the percentage of births to unmarried women held steady at 41% from 2008 through 2013. In 2014, it dropped slightly to 40%.Thus, a full understanding of why the CSE caseload has fallen remains unclear. In FY2015, there were 14.7 million CSE cases (a reduction of 24% since FY1998). The underlying data for Figure 2 (shown in Table A-2) indicate that AFDC cases comprised 85% of the CSE caseload in FY1978, but TANF dropped to about 10% of the caseload in FY2015. By the same token, non-AFDC cases represented only about 15% of the CSE caseload in FY1978, and non-TANF cases increased to almost 90% of the caseload in FY2015. Table A-2 also indicates that the CSE caseload increased 256% over the period FY1978-FY2015, from 4.146 million in FY1978 to 14.745 million in FY2015. In FY1999, OCSE started reporting data in current assistance, former assistance, and never received assistance categories rather than TANF and non-TANF. The data indicate that the number and percentage of CSE families who currently receive TANF has decreased over time while the number and percentage of CSE families who formerly received TANF has increased. The data also show that the proportion of the CSE caseload comprisedcomposed of families who had never received TANF has remained relatively stable foralso increased over the period FY1999-FY2003FY2015 (see Figure 3). The CSE caseload has been declining (with some upward fluctuations) since it reached its high point in FY1998. In FY2015, the largest group of families (47%) who were participating in the CSE program were those who had never been on the TANF rolls (i.e., never-TANF families). Families who were formerly on TANF represented 43% of the CSE caseload, and families who were currently receiving TANF benefits represented about 10% (see Figure 3). Although the majority of the CSE caseload is comprised of non-TANF families, many (see Figure 3). The decline in TANF families since 1994 (see Table 2), and the relative stability of the segment of the caseload that had never been on the TANF rolls, resulted in a smaller CSE caseload. Former TANF families represent the largest portion of the total CSE caseload.

In FY2003, the largest group of families who were participating in the CSE program were families who had left the TANF rolls (i.e., former TANF families—47%, see Figure 3).⁷ Families who had never been on TANF represented 36% of the CSE caseload and families who were currently receiving TANF benefits comprised 17% of the CSE caseload.⁸ Thus, although the majority of the CSE caseload is comprised of non-TANF families, most of them at some point in their lives received TANF/AFDC. This is consistent with the expanded mission of the CSE program. The expectation is that as child support becomes a more consistent and stable income source/support, these former TANF families will nevernot have to return to the TANF rolls, and families that never resorted to the TANF program will never have to do so. In its strategic plan for the period FY2000-FY2004, the CSE agency stated:

It is our commitment to lead the child support program into the new century as a key component to assist families to become self-sufficient or to remain self-sufficient. It is our vision that child support is an important line of defense against children living in poverty.⁹

Figure 2. Child Support Enforcement Caseload, FY1978-FY2003

Source: Office of Child Support Enforcement, HHS, Annual Reports—selected years. Figure prepared by the Congressional Research Service.

Figure 3. Child Support Enforcement Caseload, FY1999-FY2003

Source: Figures prepared by the Congressional Research Service.

In FY2003, paternity was established or acknowledged for 1.5 million children in the CSE program. Table 4 shows that during the period FY1999-FY2003, the number of paternities established or acknowledged fell 5% nationwide, from 1.6 million in FY1999 to 1.5 million in FY2003. Over that period, the number of paternities established or acknowledged in Kansas increased by 218%, from 7,347 in FY1999 to 23,356 in FY2003. In contrast, in New Mexico the number of paternities established or acknowledged decreased by 85%, from 52,380 in FY1999 to 7,639 in FY2003.

State performance on paternity establishment is calculated as a percentage of either (1) all births in a given year for which paternity is established, or (2) all cases in the state CSE program for which paternity is established. Table 5 uses all cases in the state CSE program for which paternity is established as the base. Table 5 shows the paternity establishment performance measure for FY2003. For the nation as a whole, the paternity establishment percentage (PEP) was 77%. In other words, in FY2003, there were a little over 10 million children on the CSE rolls who had been born outside of marriage, and the CSE agencies had determined paternity for 7.7 million of them. In FY2003, the PEP ranged from a low of 20% in the District of Columbia to a high of 101% in Maine and Utah. The reader should note that Table 5 indicates that for some states the PEP was greater than 100%. This occurred because paternity is established for more than just the children who were born outside of marriage in the specified year. Most states acknowledge that while they have made significant improvement in establishing paternity for newborns they are performing poorly with respect to establishing paternity for older children.