Preventing Child Support Arrears in Texas by Improving Front-end Processes

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Abstract

In 2003, the Texas Office of Attorney General fundamentally altered the process of establishing child support orders, going from a highly judicial process of establishing orders to a process that establishes most orders administratively. It also substantially improved the issuance of income withholding orders. This report describes the implementation of these reforms and measures their impact. It finds that, after the reforms were implemented, the amount of time it takes to establish child support orders and income withholding orders on newly opened cases declined significantly and the amount of arrears assessed on newly established orders declined significantly, suggesting a highly successful initiative.

Summary

Between FY 1993 and FY 2003, child support arrears grew at an alarming rate in Texas. In FY 1993, Texas had over 4 percent of the nation's IVD cases yet its IVD cases owed less than $300 million in arrears, representing less than 1 percent of the nation's arrears. Ten years later, Texas had 5.6 percent of the nation's IVD cases, but its IVD cases owed over $9 billion in arrears, representing 9.6 percent of the nation's arrears.

The Texas Office of the Attorney General (OAG) recognized early on that assessing interest at 12 percent a year was contributing to arrears growth. The problem was alleviated when the Texas Legislature reduced the interest rate to 6 percent. This change went into effect January 1, 2002. The OAG also recognized that assessing retroactive support back to the date of birth was unduly burdening non-custodial parents with large arrears. The Texas courts no longer routinely award retroactive support back to the birth of the child. Absent exceptional circumstances, the court limits retroactive support to four years preceding the filing of the petition. Although these efforts have helped stem the tide of arrears growth, the OAG wanted to do more.

The OAG applied and received an 1115 demonstration grant from the federal Office of Child Support Enforcement to prevent arrears from accumulating in the first place by improving its front-end processes. The OAG hypothesizes that if front-end processes were improved, arrears would have less opportunity to accumulate.

The specific improvements envisioned as part of this grant were to:

1. Improve and expand the use of the administrative process for establishing orders;
2. Improve the Texas computer system's order entry function; and
3. Improve the Texas computer system's issuance of automatic income withholding orders.

The OAG wanted to improve and expand the use of the administrative process for establishing orders since orders were being established more quickly under the administrative process than the judicial process. Texas had an administrative process for establishing, enforcing, and modifying child support orders, called the Child Support Review Process (CSRP). However, it had not been used much by the field staff to establish child support orders. Field staff complained that cases often took longer to process through CSRP than the court because either party could always request a judicial proceeding. Thus, time spent scheduling, preparing, and holding conferences was simply wasted. Concerns had also been expressed about the computer system interface for this process, indicating that it was cumbersome and time consuming. Nonetheless, the average amount of time it took to establish an order under the administrative process was considerably less than it took through the judicial process. Hence, the objective of this project was to improve the operation of CSRP and expand its use.

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