The 1996 "welfare Reform Act" and Family Law in Connecticut
| Pages | 303 |
| Publication year | 2021 |
71 CBJ 303. The 1996 "Welfare Reform Act" and Family Law in Connecticut
The federal "Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996" (the "Welfare Reform Act" or the "Act) (fn1) and implementing Connecticut statutes include innovative approaches to jurisdiction, paternity establishment, order modification and other aspects of interstate and intrastate child and spousal support. Familiar sections of Titles 46b, 52 and elsewhere in the General Statutes have been repealed or largely revised. Many of these changes apply to all cases involving child and spousal support, not merely to low income or interstate cases. The Welfare Reform Act also expands the federal role in child custody and visitation disputes and changes laws in fields as diverse as employment, banking, bankruptcy, immigration and tax.
This article primarily addresses the child and spousal support enforcement provisions of the Welfare Reform Act and the recently enacted Connecticut enabling acts: P.A. 97-1 (Spec. Sess.), which enacts the Uniform Interstate Family Support Act (UIFSA), and P.A. 97-7 (Spec. Sess.), which amends various support statutes. (fn2) It also analyzes the validity of the state and federal acts, discussing constitutional and practical issues, and identifies possible tension between statutes and judicial rules. Finally, it forecasts the nationalization and globalization of family law, which will lead to a revolution in domestic relations law that dwarfs in significance recent revisions to the Practice Book. (fn3)
Family law practitioners will better understand the support provisions in the Welfare Reform Act and related Connecticut legislation if they know their history and connection to broader welfare reform. In 1988, Congress created the United States Commission on Interstate Child Support (the "Commission") and asked that it make recommendations to improve the interstate child support collection system. The Commission concluded that enforcement under the existing child support system "takes too long, costs too much, and too often, fails to yield enduring, positive results." (fn4) The report asked Congress to pass legislation that would require, as a condition of receiving federal funds, state enactment of numerous statutes, including a requirement that states enact UIFSA unchanged. The Commission's recommendations became the foundation for the child support provisions in the Welfare Reform Act and should serve as the basis for state legislation necessary to comply with new federal requirements.
The Commission found that millions of American parents raise their children without the aid of the other parent. As of spring 1990, 10 million women over age 14 were living with children under 21 years of age whose fathers were not residing in the household. The vast majority of these women were entitled to child support. Additionally, men constitute 10% of the total custodial parent pool entitled to receive child support, leading the Commission to conclude that there were approximately It million custodial parents in the United States who were entitled to child support payments. (fn5)
Of the 10 million women described above, the Commission reported that only 57.7% had been awarded child support as of 1990. Although the accuracy of that figure is prob
Interstate child support enforcement was described as especially dismal in interstate cases. According to reports by custodial mothers, interstate child support cases represent approximately 30% of all child support cases in the United States. Yet, only one of every ten child support dollars collected comes from an interstate case. The Congressional General Accounting Office reported that, while mothers who knew that the fathers of their children lived in another state expected approximately $4.0 billion in child support in 1989, they only received $2.4 billion, or 60% of what was expected. Mothers who did not know the whereabouts of the father reported that they were owed approximately $500 million in child support in 1989, but reported receiving only $200 million, or 37% of what was expected. Some studies relying on self-reports by noncustodial fathers have found higher rates of support payment, but most estimates are in line with the GAO study.
The Welfare Reform Act included additional demographic information. In 1992, only 54% of single-parent families with children had a child support order established; of that 54%, only about one half received full payments of amounts due. Eighty-nine percent of children receiving AFDC benefits iii 1996 lived in homes in which the father was absent. The average monthly number of children receiving AFDC benefits in 1992 was 9,300,000, up from 3,300,000 in 1965. Congress viewed this as an alarming figure, especially considering that over the same thirty-year period the number of children ages 0-18 declined by 5.5%. The Act indicates that a direct link exists between swelling AFDC rolls and the fail
ure to establish and enforce child support orders. (fn7)
Enlarging support collections is critical to the larger federal government effort to reduce "AFDC" rolls. The term "AFDC" no longer exists under federal law and has been replaced with "TANF" (Temporary Assistance for Needy Families block grants to the states). Connecticut enabling legislation uses the term "AFDC" when describing its public assistance program, even though Connecticut renamed its public assistance program "TFX' at the same time it passed the support legislation. (fn8) For sake of clarity this article also uses the term "AFDC" when referring to what in actuality are TFA references in Public Acts 97-1 and 97-7.
Incremental implementation of the Welfare Reform Act as federal and state law will erode jurisdictional barriers to expeditious enforcement of support orders and create aggressive new measures to compel payment of child and spousal support. Drafting state enabling legislation is a significant task, and one currently led by governmental agencies in most states. In Connecticut, the small working group that drafted enabling legislation did not include any practicing private family law attorneys, which may explain the odd practical effects of some provisions.
The child support provisions in Public Acts 97-1, 97-7 and the Welfare Reform Act provide that obligor parents will have their assets systematically seized, lose privileges if they do not meet their obligations to their children and former spouses, and suffer penalties designed to deter nonpayment. Connecticut already had one of the most successful support enforcement systems in the United States. (fn9) Following incremental implementation of the state and federal acts, Connecticut obligees will have more swift, certain, and meaningful methods of collecting child and spousal support through state Ti
tle IV-D agencies. The discussion of enforcement measures that follows is organized by the likely practical significance of each measure, with the most important measures discussed first.
A. Case Tracking, Information Sharing and Automation
It is impossible to enforce a support obligation if one is unable to locate the obligor parent, his income, or his assets. (fn10) The Welfare Reform Act creates a series of interconnected databases on the local, state, national and international levels that form the backbone for most of the new support enforcement provisions, not to mention the public assistance and immigration provisions of the Act. Custodial parents, their attorneys, state agencies, courts, and others will benefit from information sharing on an unprecedented scale, making enforcement in interstate and intrastate cases faster and more effective than ever before.
The discussion of information sharing requirements that follows primarily examines federal requirements, with references to implementing legislation in Connecticut. Family law practitioners should be more interested in the national information sharing scheme, and enhanced access to information collected throughout the United States and the world, than in the implementing legislation enacted in Connecticut, which is a very small part of the larger information network. The average practitioner may not see the automated systems at work, but should know what information is available.
1. State & Local Information Collection & Sharing
At the center of the complicated web of state and local databases mandated by the Welfare Reform Act is the State Case Registry, which will contain records on each case in which a state provides welfare services and every support order established or modified on or after October 1, 1998. (fn11) In Connecticut, the State Case Registry will be under the control of the Support Enforcement Division, which is within the Judicial Branch but operates under a cooperative agreement with
the Department of Social Services. (fn12)
A State Case Registry may be established by linking local case registries of support orders through a computer network, but it must use standardized data elements for all entries (such as names, social security numbers and other uniform identification numbers, dates of birth, and case identification numbers) and include any other information that may be...
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