Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, February 22, 1995 TAG: 9502220099
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: JENNIFER DIXON ASSOCIATED PRESS
DATELINE: WASHINGTON LENGTH: Medium
The number of non-paying parents on the federal payroll is potentially embarrassing for President Clinton, who promised tougher child-support enforcement during his campaign, made it a central part of his welfare reform plan and brought it up during his last State of the Union address.
The federal government has known about the problem for years but has done little to fix it, said Paula Roberts, a child-support expert with the Center for Law and Social Policy, a liberal research and advocacy organization.
``It's really a disgrace. It's a little hard for them to get on the moral high ground about all the deadbeats out there, when they can't even clean their own house,'' Roberts said. ``The government does have the ability to go after its own and reinforce the moral and financial message, and it has chosen not to do that.''
Although states are responsible for collecting child support and establishing paternity - the first step in getting court-ordered support - they need help from the federal government if the parent is a federal employee.
When a state requests help, the federal Office of Child Support Enforcement, a part of the Department of Health and Human Services, searches federal and military personnel records for the addresses and employers of non-paying parents.
With that information, states can try to get the parents to court hearings and deduct child support from their paychecks. But Roberts and federal officials say the process is extremely cumbersome and in need of reform.
HHS said its locator service last year found 74,880 non-paying parents employed by the Defense Department, military and civilian, and 30,831working for other federal agencies, the federal judiciary, and the Postal Service.
HHS does not track how much money is owed, but in an investigation six years ago, the HHS inspector general found 64,310 federal employees who owed as much as $284 million in child support. In two-thirds of the cases, the children were on welfare.
Current HHS estimates say non-paying parents represent 3.2 percent of the Defense Department's work force and 1.3 percent of the federal work force, including the Postal Service.
David Gray Ross, who oversees the federal child support office, says the government is sending the wrong message by failing to get tough with its own employees, but legislation being drafted in Congress as part of welfare reform will help address the problem by establishing central registries that track child support orders and all new hires.
Rep. Clay Shaw, R-Fla., who oversees the Republican effort to rewrite the nation's welfare laws, said it is the ``height of hypocrisy'' for the White House to claim to be tough on deadbeat parents when it has failed to make its own workers pay.
Rep. Patricia Schroeder, a Colorado Democrat who has worked on the issue for years, calls child-support enforcement ``welfare prevention.''
``Many, many of those cases get rolled onto the welfare rolls, and that is just outrageous,'' she said.
Roberts said the president could address at least part of the problem by executive order, without a vote of Congress, starting with a requirement that the military cooperate with the state agencies.
Some base commanders refuse to allow employees to be served with court orders requiring them to pay or appear in court, or refuse to let parents attend hearings until they are on leave or out of the service, she said.
``These are people with regular paychecks that can be garnisheed. These parents are people with access to health insurance that could cover their kids. And these in many cases they are people who could get extra military allotments to pay for the support of their kids,'' Roberts said.
by CNB