Parents Rights Group Opposes Bill to Bring IRS into Child Support Collection

HR 1488, the Hyde-Woolsey Act, misses the point, and would do more harm than good.

Friday, March 17, 2000

ANCPR, the Alliance for Non-Custodial Parents Rights, a national parents rights group is urging its membership to write their elected representatives in opposition to the Hyde-Woolsey Act, HR 1488. The measure would charge the IRS with the responsibility of enforcing and collecting child support nationwide.

The Child Support Enforcement program, authorized under Title IV-D of the Social Security Act, has been criticized for not collecting enough child support payments from sufficient numbers of noncustodial parents. Created in 1975, the Federal-State program has now grown to about 55,000 employees nationwide and an annual budget of around $3.6 billion. In 1998, the most recent year for which data are available, the program collected nearly $14.4 billion in child support payments for single mothers and their children, located 6.5 million noncustodial parents, established 848,000 paternities, and established 1.1 million child support orders. Collections by the child support program have increased more than 60 percent since 1993.

Even so, critics believe the program should be more efficient and should collect more money for more single parents. Judiciary Committee Chairman Henry Hyde (R-IL) and Rep. Lynn Woolsey (D-CA) have introduced legislation (H.R.1488) that would turn responsibility for the program over to the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). More specifically, in addition to essentially ending the current child support program, the bill would require all employers to withhold child support payments and send them to the IRS. The IRS would then distribute the withheld amount to custodial parents owed child support. The bill would also treat child support obligations as taxes for purposes of penalties and interest related to failure to have them withheld by employers.

According to ANCPR, the primary reason that child support goes uncollected is that the obligor simply doesn’t have the ability to pay, or doesn’t even know that an order exists. For example, prosecutors in Los Angeles County, California have acknowledged that on average they incorrectly name the wrong man about 350 times a month in default paternity cases. These men often find themselves facing enormous arrears due to retroactive orders and must pay although they were never notified of the hearings, and DNA tests prove they are not the fathers.

Uncollected child support will continue to be a problem until Congress faces up to the real problem. Child support guidelines are too high, and due process rights are not observed with regard to the modification of support obligations in the face of the changing circumstances of the obligated parent. In addition, child support needs to be tied to parental access in order to guarantee that all children have an ongoing and meaningful relationship with both of their parents.

Since February of 1999, the members of ANCPR have used the web-based ANCPR Legislative Action Center to send over 25,000 letters to Congress detailing the concerns of non-custodial parents and protesting the injustices of our nation’s Family Court System. ANCPR is a nationwide, non-sectarian organization devoted to protecting and promoting the rights of non-custodial parents. It was founded in 1995 and has members in all 50 states. It can be found on the Web at www.ancpr.org.

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