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Version | Office of
Child Support Enforcement |
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Thursday, Oct. 12, 2000
Contact: HHS Press Office, (202) 690-6343
STATEMENT
BY DONNA E. SHALALA
Secretary of Health and Human Services
Regarding Child Support and Fatherhood Legislation
I congratulate Senators
Evan Bayh, Herb Kohl, Olympia Snowe, Daniel Patrick Moynihan and John
Breaux on the introduction of bipartisan legislation that addresses two
key priorities for the Clinton Administration: ensuring that more child
support goes to children and promoting responsible fatherhood. This bill,
the Child Support Distribution Act, would increase child support payments
to low-income women and children by over $1 billion per year when it is
fully implemented and provide grants to promote responsible fatherhood.
I applaud the strong bipartisan support for similar legislation that passed
the House with the leadership of Representatives Nancy Johnson and Ben
Cardin by a vote of 405-18. These bills are similar in many ways to the
Administration's proposals, and I urge Congress to take action this year
on these critically important issues.
The legislation introduced
today would make major changes to the way child support is distributed,
so that much more of the past-due support collected will go directly to
former welfare families who are working hard to make ends meet. It also
provides incentives and encouragement for states to directly pass through
current child support payments to mothers and children on welfare.
This bill also creates
two new fatherhood grant programs to promote marriage and to provide employment
and parenting services to help fathers to provide their children with
financial and emotional support. These programs would encourage and expand
the activity already underway in many communities and build on our long-standing
commitment to strengthen the role of fathers in their children's lives.
This legislation
also strengthens the existing child support enforcement tools. The bill:
1) lowers the threshold for denying a passport - to a parent delinquent
on child support - from $5,000 to $2,500 in past-due support; 2) denies
visas to nonimmigrant aliens who owe over $2,500 in child support; and
3) allows the tax offset program to be used to collect child support debts
even after the child has reached 18.
We've had great success
in collecting more child support from more parents for more children than
ever before. We doubled collections from $8 billion in 1992 to nearly
$16 billion in 1999. The federal-state child support enforcement program
has tracked down 3.5 million delinquent parents through the National Directory
of New Hires, tripled paternity establishments, found over 900,000 financial
accounts of parents who have child support debts and collected $4 million
in lump sum payments by denying passports at the rate of 30 to 40 a day.
But, we can do more.
We have the opportunity to make a huge down payment to provide more support
for children and strengthen families. We look forward to working with
the Senate to pass child support and responsible fatherhood legislation
this year.
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Note: All HHS press releases, fact sheets and other press materials are
available at http://www.hhs.gov/news.
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October 22, 2003
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