$3 billion owed in child support

Updated: September 24, 2012 6:25AM

Illinois children are owed $3 billion in back child support. They were owed roughly that much last year, the year before that and the year before that.

Meanwhile the state is losing ground in current collections, taking in roughly 58 percent of current support due. What many children are owed, they are not likely to get.

“Some of that, particularly the arrearages, will never be collected,” contends Malcolm Rich, executive director of the Chicago Appleseed Fund for Justice, which has focused on child support issues.

It’s a persistent state and national problem made worse by the recession, and multiple issues are to blame. The major factor is the bulk of back support is owed by parents with little or no income, family advocates, researchers and legal experts say. Other problems are weaknesses in the child support system, including unrealistic support orders, and deadbeat parents — those who can afford to pay but don’t — can be hard to find and prosecute.

Collecting more of the support could lift many families out of poverty and prevent others from becoming poor. A report released last December by Urban Institute Senior Fellow Elaine Sorensen found that in 2008, 625,000 children nationally would have been poor if they had not received child support, and that child support lifted 1 million people from poverty that year.

“It’s rough,” said Chicagoan Denise Marshall.

She was supposed to be getting $275 every two weeks in child support to help care for her 13-year-old daughter. The order was put in place seven months ago, but she said she hasn’t received a dime because her child’s dad’s whereabouts are unknown to her and the state. Marshall has no job and is relying on public aid to support her child. She’s participating in a job training program at the Howard Area Employment Resource Center.

“I would be able to put more food in my refrigerator,” if she was getting the support, Marshall said.

Missed child support payments have also created difficulties for LaTanya Hubbert, who works as a service clerk at a local retail pharmacy and who does not receive public assistance. She has gone several months over the past three years without getting the $150 in child support every two weeks she’s supposed to get to help care for her 13-year-old son, she said.

“I depend on that to help me pay expenses,” she said. “It makes a huge difference as to whether I can buy groceries for two days, to getting his hair cut, to getting a $1,000 root canal he needs.”

Her ex-husband is unemployed, and the support she has received lately has been deducted by the state from his unemployment checks, she noted.

Unemployment and underemployment is a key factor in the high level of back support owed, said Rich. Indeed, the Illinois Healthcare and Family Services Department’s Child Support Services Division said among its clients, 57 percent of non-custodial parents have no reported income, and 28 percent have reported income of less than $30,000 annually.

A study released in 2007 from the Urban Institute looking at back support owed in Illinois and eight other states found that 70 percent of the back support owed in 2003-04 was owed by parents who had no reported income or income of $10,000 a year or less. The report estimated that only 40 percent of the arrears owed at that time was likely to be collected over 10 years, and the backlog was projected to grow by 60 percent over that time.

“We have an expression in child support, you can’t squeeze blood from a turnip,” said Ron Haskins, co-director of the Center on Children and Families at Brookings Institution. “Many of these fathers do not have jobs.”

“In some cases, these are situations where people get in over their heads and cannot pay the support,” said Rich. “They don’t pay the support. They give up, and the arrear­ages pile up. But you’ve got to get them back into the system at least paying the current child support.”

Mark Lopez, Cook County Circuit Court associate judge, said when a non-custodial payor parent loses a job or has his or her income reduced, that parent can be eligible to have the support order lowered.

The number of Illinois parents requesting court reviews to lower the child support they pay has nearly tripled in recent years — from 4,219 in 2006 to 12,629 last year.

Even so, many parents don’t contact child support services or seek legal action to have the amount reduced, he said.

“The arrearage is caused because they didn’t know enough to come into court to ask for a modification,” Lopez said. “They lose their job, and quite often a couple of years will go by before they ever go in. They’ve got two years of arrears now, but they are still unemployed or marginally employed, and they just don’t have the means to make up the difference.”

The median amount owed in back support in Illinois, according to the Urban Institute study, was $4,467 in 2003-04. The average was $11,365. Mirroring a national trend, most of the arrearages were owed by a minority of parents who owe sizable sums. In Illinois, 10 percent of those owing back support were $30,000 or more in arrears, yet they owed nearly half of all the overdue support.

Illinois has attempted to slow the growth of arrearages in part by setting more realistic orders, said Pam Lowry, administrator of the state’s Child Support Services Division. In the past, if a child support order was established for a family on public assistance, if the child was, for example, 5 years old, the division would automatically ask the court for arrears going back to the date of the child’s birth. “We no longer do that,” said Lowry. “We try very hard not to start people off with arrears.”

The state also has focused on increasing the percentage of support collected as it’s due, said Lowry. A decade ago, Illinois was on the verge of being sanctioned when it was collecting only 36 percent of current support.

There has been improvement, with the collection rate reaching 58.03 percent in 2009, but it slipped to 57.85 percent last year. Lowry said the state would like to exceed the national average of 61.9 percent.

“The recession has affected this goal,” Lowry said.

Rich, who serves on the division’s advisory committee, said the child support system in Illinois has improved, but much more needs to be done.

“I think more can be collected,” he said. “Part of the issue is what’s going on in the trenches.”

Customer service remains a problem at the state agency, he said. Indeed, Lowry concedes the wait time when a parent calls is typically about 20 minutes. But that’s an improvement from the average 45-minute wait time before the division set up a centralized call center, she said.

In addition, judges need to make better use of their ability to deviate from stringent guidelines that dictate the percent of a non-custodial parent’s income that must go to child support, Rich said.

“Can we work out a system where less money from a non-custodial parent is better than no money collected at all?” he asked.