Persecuting Low Income Parents
By
Glenn Sacks and Jeffery M. Leving
© 2005
In a highly-publicized move, Jefferson County, Kentucky
Attorney Irv Maze recently published the names and addresses of
1,000 alleged “deadbeat parents” in the Louisville Courier-Journal.
The move has drawn praise nationally, and Maze says the list is
helping his office locate debtors. However, most of the parents on
Maze’s humiliating list are not those who won’t pay, but instead
those who can’t pay.
Federal Office of Child Support Enforcement data shows that
two-thirds of those who owe child support nationwide earned less
than $10,000 in the previous 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. A US Government Accounting Office survey of
custodial mothers who were not receiving the support they were owed
found that two-thirds of those fathers who do not pay their child
support fail to do so because they are indigent.
These research findings are reflected in Kentucky's Top 10 Most
Wanted Parents list. Of those “deadbeats” currently listed, only one
appears to have any education at all, and the most common
designation for occupation is "laborer." Far from being a list of
well-heeled businessmen, lawyers, and accountants, these men do low
wage and often seasonal work, and owe large sums of money which most
could never hope to pay off.
Kentucky’s list of low income "deadbeats" is typical of the child
support evaders lists put out by most states. For example,
Virginia's new list is topped by a laborer, a carnival hired hand,
and a construction worker, who collectively somehow "owe” over a
quarter million dollars in child support!
The driving force behind child support arrearages is not bad
parents, but instead rigid child support systems which are mulishly
impervious to the economic realities non-custodial parents face,
such as layoffs, wage cuts, and work-related injuries. According to
the Urban Institute, less than one in 20 non-custodial parents who
suffer substantial income drops are able to get courts to reduce
their child support payments. In such cases, the amounts owed mount
quickly, as do interest and penalties.
Compounding the problem is the fact that the federal Bradley
Amendment bars judges from retroactively forgiving child support
arrearages, even when they determine that the arrearage occurred
through no fault of the obligor. Bradley is so problematic that
Congress will be conducting hearings on the amendment this fall.
In one McCracken County, Kentucky case, Francis Borgia, a carpet
cleaner in Paducah, slit his throat in the courtroom after being
sentenced to two years in jail for being $7,000 behind on child
support. According to newspaper accounts, Borgia had become a
“deadbeat” after he lost a good paying job working in a casino and
could not get a downward modification on his support.
Also victimized by Maze’s list are those who are named in error. For
example, according to television station WAVE 3 in Louisville, Maze
mistakenly listed James R. Frazier as a deadbeat who owes $57,000,
and gave out his current home address. Frazier and his wife Bertha
have been erroneously targeted by enforcement officials before, and
have spent years fighting to straighten out the error. The agency
had previously acknowledged its mistake—and then went ahead and
published the erroneous information anyway.
Child support collection agencies are notorious for their errors and
bureaucratic bungling, as even supporters of the lists such as the
Association for Children for Enforcement of Support admit. A study
conducted by ACES revealed that state child support enforcement
agencies nationwide had failed to distribute over $500 million which
had been paid by non-custodial parents.
Beyond mistaken identity, as in the Frazier case, common agency
errors include: mathematical errors; failure to record or transfer
records of payments; billing men for children they did not father;
failing to stop child support when a child reaches the age of
emancipation; accepting custodial parents' false reports of
nonpayment; and failure to update child support orders with later
court rulings affecting modifications. Audits and evaluations have
shown that errors comprise a third of all arrearages in some states
and counties.
It is true that jailing those behind on child support does sometimes
result in some of the arrearages being paid. However, this is
usually not because the low income dad they’ve arrested has decided
to sell his Porsche and his vacation home, but instead because his
family and friends have put up the money to keep him out of jail.
Even when dealing with the small percentage of fathers who have the
money to pay but choose not to, Maze’s approach is at times
misguided. According to the Children's Rights Council, a
Washington-based advocacy group, more than five million American
children each year have their access to their non-custodial parents
interfered with or blocked by custodial parents. Family courts are
often tragically indifferent to enforcing non-custodial parents’
visitation rights. One can understand why non-custodial parents who
have been driven out of their children’s lives feel little
motivation to subsidize the custodial parent’s filching of their
children.
In contrast to Maze’s abusive, overkill approach, state child
support systems need to be made more flexible and responsive, so
that low income parents aren't made into criminals because they’ve
failed to pay child support obligations which are beyond their
reach. As Borgia, who survived his courtroom suicide attempt, noted:
“My only ‘crime’ was my failure to make as much money as the state
demanded…I couldn't quite understand why I was treated so harshly.
I'm not a deadbeat dad. I'm a broke dad."
This article first appeared in the Cincinnati Post & the Kentucky
Post (8/26/05).
Jeffery M. Leving is one of America's most prominent family law
attorneys. He is the author of the book Fathers' Rights:
Hard-hitting and Fair Advice for Every Father Involved in a Custody
Dispute. His website is
www.dadsrights.com.
Glenn Sacks is a men's and fathers' issues columnist and a
nationally-syndicated radio talk show host. His columns have
appeared in dozens of America's largest newspapers.
Glenn can be reached via his website at
www.GlennSacks.com or via
email at Glenn@GlennSacks.com.
Copyright 2005 Glenn
Sacks, all rights reserved
