Support Payments

The man came to court in leg chains, full of excuses for not paying $30,000 in back child support.It wasn't his fault, he told the judge. He had been in prison for two years on a drunken-driving charge. Now he has a job that pays only $200 a week."I've got a second job for you," said an impatient Baltimore Circuit Judge Lawrence R. Daniels."Have you ever heard of Martin's West? [Martin R. Resnick] will hire you on the spot and pay you $7 an hour, more than you're making now," said the judge.

Troubled by the failure of Lockheed-Martin IMS to meet child support collection goals, state officials said yesterday they will not extend the firm's contract when it expires in October.The Lockheed Martin Corp. subsidiary has been collecting child support payments in Baltimore City and Queen Anne's County since 1996.Last year, it collected $63.1 million in Baltimore -- far short of the $110 million it promised in its agreement with the state.The Maryland Department of Human Resources has imposed a $407,000 penalty on the company for failing to meet its own collection projections.

Tickled that its first child support amnesty effort went well last June, the Anne Arundel County Domestic Relations Office is expanding the program.Starting Tuesday, and running through June 18, the agency will offer three weeks of no penalties for parents who are arrears in child support payments and want to make good. Last year's program lasted two weeks."We encourage people who are not in compliance to try to come in and work something out. Some of these people may even have warrants out on them currently," said Wendy Weeks, special assistant state's attorney for domestic relations.

The Maryland Child Support Enforcement Administration has pulled in nearly $40 million in child-support payments since October 1996 from deadbeat parents who drive cars or look for jobs.But the state still has a $1 billion backlog of unpaid support, in part because, as some Baltimore-area women have found out, there are ways to avoid paying even when state officials track those who owe through driving records and employment applications. Their husbands -- 90 percent of deadbeat parents are fathers -- have moved out of state or have arranged to be paid under the table for their jobs.

STUDIES of a $12 million multi-city program to help poor, absentee fathers become better parents are not encouraging.The goal was to increase the income and employment of the fathers so that they could better provide for their children and take some of the pressure off mothers.But researchers at the Manpower Development Research Corp. in New York found that the efforts either failed and were only moderately successful in getting the men to make child support payments.The study of the Parents' Fair Share looked at projects in seven cities -- Los Angeles; Memphis; Jacksonville, Fla.; Dayton, Ohio; Grand Rapids, Mich.

The Maryland Child Support Enforcement Administration has pulled in nearly $40 million in child-support payments since October 1996 from deadbeat parents who drive cars or look for jobs.But the state still has a $1 billion backlog of unpaid support, in part because, as some Baltimore-area women have found out, there are ways to avoid paying even when state officials track those who owe through driving records and employment applications. Their husbands -- 90 percent of deadbeat parents are fathers -- have moved out of state or have arranged to be paid under the table for their jobs.

WASHINGTON -- More than 10 million children who are owed billions in back child support will be left out when a national computer system to track delinquent parents goes into effect today.The new Federal Case Registry, when combined with the national Directory of New Hires, is supposed to provide information on those parents who are earning money and aren't making their child support payments.So far, 40 states and three territories have computer tracking systems that are ready to feed information into the national registry, said Michael Kharfen, spokesman for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

The Maryland Child Support Enforcement Administration has pulled in nearly $40 million in child-support payments since October 1996 from deadbeat parents who drive cars or look for jobs.But the state still has a $1 billion backlog of unpaid support, in part because, as some Baltimore-area women have found out, there are ways to avoid paying even when state officials track those who owe through driving records and employment applications. Their husbands -- 90 percent of deadbeat parents are fathers -- have moved out of state or have arranged to be paid under the table for their jobs.

A former Prince George's County auto mechanic has been arrested on charges he failed to make more than $45,000 in child support payments over the past five years, federal officials said yesterday.Vincent Hahn, 52, formerly of Cheverly, was arrested in Hendersonville, N.C., where officials say he had moved to avoid making monthly payments of $748 to support his three daughters.Hahn is charged with violating federal child support recovery laws. No trial date has been set.Pub Date: 8/27/97

WASHINGTON -- Parents raising their children without the other parent have no right to go to court to force states to do a better job of collecting child support payments, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously yesterday.A 1975 federal law that sets up an elaborate system to enforce child support does not give parents any enforceable right to have the system work successfully, the court declared.As a result of the ruling, parents apparently will have to rely mainly on federal officials, using the threat of a cutoff of federal funds to states, to try to bring a state government into line with its duties under the 1975 law.The government has used that threat repeatedly against Arizona, the state involved in yesterday's ruling, but that state still has a record of getting regular child support payments for fewer than 5 percent of the parents it serves, the court noted.

Maryland's child support guidelines are based on economic data from the 1970s - something the state Department of Human Resources hopes to change next year. The department is pushing a new set of guidelines that would increase the amount most noncustodial parents pay. For the lowest-income families, child support payments would go down slightly, which department officials say could decrease the number of parents who dodge the system. Human Resources officials, who oversee court-ordered child support collection, have unsuccessfully lobbied state lawmakers several times in recent years to update the guidelines, which underwent their last major revision in 1988.

A state legislative audit has found that the Child Support Enforcement Administration is owed $1.5 billion in unpaid child support payments. That sounds like a lot of money - and a lot of deadbeat dads - until you realize the figure includes the cumulative unpaid child support since the agency began keeping records in the 1974. Much of the debt still on the books was incurred by absent parents who have long since died or disappeared; the state's chief auditor estimates that only about half of it would be considered collectible today.

Of those everyone loves to hate, few can compete with the deadbeat dad for longevity. How much do we hate him? While we're counting the ways, Fox TV may try to help America organize its contempt and put a face on this loathsome character. Bad Dads, redundant in these male-bashing times, is the name of a new reality show Fox is considering. While the network reviews the pilot, outraged fathers' advocates are trying to nip this bad seed before it buds. As proposed, the show features a bounty hunter sort of character, which is not an entirely fictional device.

The heated debates during the crafting of the 1996 welfare reform law were memorable for one point of agreement between those on opposite sides of the issue. If welfare mothers were being asked to be more responsible for their children's economic well-being, both sides concurred, then absentee dads were fair game, too. Get the bums to pay child support, the thinking went, and the welfare rolls would shrink. Within the first four years of passage of the law, the rolls did shrink and the number of welfare cases closed because of child support collected increased by 56 percent, according to the U.S. Department of Heath and Human Services Child support collection rates have been rising ever since, from $12 billion to $22 billion since the law was passed.

Thousands of Maryland residents who owe back child support are being encouraged to pay up as part of a two-week amnesty program offered by the state Department of Human Resources. The amnesty program, which targets 30,000 state residents, some of whom risk arrest for failure to pay child support, begins today and will end Aug. 13. The program is also being offered in Washington and Arlington, Va., as part of a tri-jurisdictional effort to support families. "You can imagine that Prince George's County shares a number of cases with the District of Columbia and Northern Virginia," said Brian Shea, executive director of Maryland's Child Support Enforcement Administration.

Helping parents meet obligations to their children The Sun correctly points out the multiple benefits of Baltimore County's efforts to connect parents who owe child support to jobs ("Helping deadbeat dads," editorial, Jan. 4). The state should adopt a similarly prudent approach. In Maryland, child support debts owed by low-income parents are frequently owed to the state, because custodial parents who receive welfare are required to sign over child support rights to the state. But current child support enforcement policies, which can involve garnishment of up to 65 percent of an indebted parent's wages, force too many fathers into underground economies and out of their children's lives.

WHAT CAN BE done to help fathers fulfill their obligation to pay child support? Baltimore County is the latest jurisdiction to make the admirable effort to connect deadbeat dads to decent jobs. It's certainly not uncommon for fathers to fall behind in payments to children with whom they no longer live. Nationally, some $92 billion is owed in child support; Maryland accounts for about $1.4 billion, with about $30 million owed in Baltimore County. While failure to pay can result in jail time, more jurisdictions are figuring out that it may be better to help dads pay up rather than to lock them up. In Baltimore County, options such as work release and home detention proved to be only marginally effective, as the operational costs often exceeded the amount of support collected.

Richard Eidinger Jr. has been in and out of court for two years. He's been locked up. And he's been threatened with more jail time if he doesn't pay more of the $26,000 in child support he owes his ex-wife. Still, the 26-year-old father acknowledges that he hasn't managed to pay more than $70 a week lately. He told a judge at a recent contempt hearing in Baltimore County Circuit Court that it's not because he doesn't want to make his payments but because he can't find a good-paying job. "I think we should find him a better job," Judge John O. Hennegan responded.

Maximus Inc., the Virginia company that has run Baltimore's child support enforcement program for four years, appears to have lost its bid for a new state contract to a rival firm. The Department of Human Resources has recommended that the Board of Public Works award the lucrative contract to Denver-based Policy Studies Inc. The contract, which runs at least 4 1/4 years and perhaps as long as 6 1/4 years, is worth an estimated $10 million to $15 million a year to the contractor. The decision prompted House Appropriations Committee Chairman Howard P. Rawlings to write a letter to Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. urging him to reject the procurement.

The former director of an innovative Anne Arundel County social services project was charged yesterday with stealing $368,000 from the program, including money that was supposed to go toward child support. Prosecutors said the 91-count criminal information unsealed yesterday was the start of a wave of nearly 800 charges expected to be lodged against Brent Millard Johnson, 61, of Annapolis. Because court computers cannot handle more than 99 counts per multiple-count document, the additional charges will be filed in coming days, prosecutors said.