Money for nothing: states are finally collecting money from deadbeat dads. Now, if they'd only get it to the moms.

• Author: Bergo, Sandy

LONG AFTER HER DIVORCE, JANE Baker had thought of child support as a "bonus." Sometimes her ex-husband sent the checks to her home in Ohio, sometimes he didn't. Usually he didn't. Over nine years, her ex-husband, who lived across the border in Michigan, had piled up a debt of $68,000 in unpaid support. He had even left a decent job as an Army recruiter, Baker says, because Uncle Sam was about to garnishee his pay for child support. But when catching so-called "deadbeat dads" became a cause celebre in the 1990s, Baker, like millions of other divorced single mothers, thought her time had come. Tired of waiting for her ex-husband to send checks on his own, Baker kept up the pressure on state and local child support agencies to get him to pay. Finally, after nine years of prodding caseworkers, talking to lawyers, and appearing in court, her efforts paid off: A Michigan judge ordered Baker's ex-husband to send her $284 every two weeks--money she could use for an emergency room visit, braces, and senior-class photos for her two sons--or go to jail.

But still the checks came only intermittently. Once again, Baker assumed her husband was to blame. When she took him to court this time, however, she discovered he had been paying, through regular deductions from his paycheck. This time, it wasn't his fault. It was the fault of the government agency charged with collecting the money from him and sending it on to her. When I asked officials to look into Baker's case, it turned out that many checks had been delayed, one had been lost, and one payment was stuck in the agency's bank account. The fate of the last was especially infuriating: The Michigan agency had made a mistake on the check sent to Ohio, but when Ohio sent it back, Michigan decided not to reissue it. Why? Because a new state computer system couldn't display information on certain lost or corrected checks. And it wasn't fixed until September, when a programming upgrade kicked in. So a January payment from Baker's ex-husband has sat in a Michigan bank account for months--along with another $9.3 million owed to other parents much like her, the vast majority of them former welfare recipients entitled to the money under new welfare reform rules. "We know who the recipients are," says Jane Varner, the head of child support enforcement in Wayne County, Mich. "We just can't get it to them."

Michigan is not alone. Once upon a time, the biggest obstacle to child support for women like Baker was their ex-husbands. Today, though, state-run collection agencies have an impressive array of enforcement tools at their disposal, helping them collect billions in child support every year. But while states are getting better and better at collecting the money, they're getting worse at distributing that money to whom it's due. On any given day, the state agencies that collect child support are sitting on a pot of gold worth hundreds of millions of dollars; on Sept. 30, 2001, the end of the last federal fiscal year, $738 million worth of child support had been paid in by parents, but not yet paid out to custodial parents and their children. For these parents, most of them women, deadbeat dads aren't the problem. Deadbeat states are.

And the crisis is intensifying. The problem of "undistributed collections," as the feds call it, has been mentioned during congressional hearings, but has received scant news coverage. Although federal officials are well aware of the problem, the Bush administration has so far declined to step in and mandate reforms. Meanwhile, by this fall, some two million single parents will have been kicked off or left welfare thanks to the pressure of time limits established in 1996's welfare reform law. Almost all of them are owed child support--money on which their ability to provide for themselves and their children in a post-welfare world depends.

Collector's Guide

When Congress established state-operated child support programs in 1975, its intent wasn't to help children but to recoup welfare costs by, in effect, turning welfare into a debt that child support would partially repay. To receive welfare benefits, mothers signed over their rights to child support and agreed to help collection efforts by identifying the father and telling caseworkers where to find him. Women on welfare got little extra for their cooperation--$50 per month of the child support collected--and the state kept the rest until a mother's welfare debt was satisfied.

Not surprisingly, collection rates were low. States lacked the technology and infrastructure to pursue the fathers--many poor themselves--and mothers had little incentive to cooperate. During the 1980s and 1990s, the federal government expanded the role of state child support programs to help families who were not on the welfare rolls, in the hope of keeping them that way. To increase the odds of collecting support, the federal government helped the state agencies upgrade their information technology, providing improved record-keeping and better information-sharing between county and state officials and to the federal government. Adding a stick to the carrot, the federal government also began to assess multimillion dollar penalties against states that missed federal deadlines for updating computer systems.

They succeeded, at least in part. Centralized payment centers were established in each state, to take control from inefficient or...