Patterns of Child Support Compliance in Wisconsin

Abstract

This article examines 5-year compliance patterns among Wisconsin child support cases that came to court in 1986-1988. We find only limited support for the common assumption that compliance with child support orders declines over time. The average percentage paid is about .65 during each of the first 5 years following divorce or the establishment of paternity. One trend is an increasing polarization into groups of nonpayers and full payers. Although we find considerable stability from year to year among nonpayers (79% of nonpayers in one year do not pay in the following year) and full payers (84% of those who pay in full one year also pay in full the next), there is considerable change over the course of 5 years. Compliance during the first year provides some indication of long-term compliance, but about half of fathers change their compliance rate over the period. We find important differences between divorced and unmarried fathers, differences that are more pronounced than is apparent from a single year of data. Key Words: child support, compliance, single-parent families. Children living in single-parent families are economically vulnerable, with about half of such children living in poverty (U.S. Bureau of the Census, 1996). This economic insecurity and the increasing numbers of such children have triggered considerable interest in the effectiveness of the child support system. Researchers and policymakers widely acknowledge that low compliance with existing child support obligations is problematic. Nationally, approximately one half of resident parents with child support orders received the full amount due in 1991, one fourth received partial payments, and one fourth received nothing (U.S. Bureau of the Census 1995). Low annual compliance also has been documented in a variety of local and state studies (e.g., Bartfeld & Meyer, 1994; Meyer & Bartfeld, 1996; Peters, Argys, Maccoby, & Mnookin, 1993). Accordingly, numerous policy initiatives over the past two decades have attempted to increase rates of compliance. Such initiatives include intercepting income tax refunds of noncomplying, nonresident parents; placing liens on the property of delinquent obligors; and routinely withholding child support from the wages of parents with support orders. The most recent initiatives were part of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunities Reconciliation Act of 1996, which requires states to have legislation in place to rescind driver's licenses and professional licenses when nonresident parents become delinquent in their payments. Despite the consensus that child support compliance is inadequate, existing knowledge about long-term compliance is surprisingly limited. We know little about how aggregate compliance rates change between the early and later years of an order, and more important, we know little about how compliance changes from year to year at the individual level or how annual compliance compares with compliance over the longer term. Such information is critical both in defining the problem of low child support compliance and in designing appropriate interventions. This article begins to fill these gaps by presenting data on aggregate and micro-level patterns of compliance among divorced and unmarried fathers who have child support orders in Wisconsin. THEORY AND LITERATURE REVIEW Theoretical models of child support compliance typically posit that compliance is affected by the nonresident parent's ability to pay, by the economic needs of the resident parent, by the strength of the ties between the nonresident parent and his or her ex-partner and children, and by the stringency of the enforcement system. These models have been substantiated to varying degrees by empirical work examining the extent to which nonresident fathers comply with child support orders at a particular point in time. (See, for example, Meyer & Bartfeld, 1996; Peters et al., 1993. …