Did UIFSA close the 'Black Hole' of Interstate Enforcement? Evidence from the Survey of Income and Program Participation. Yunhee Chang, The University of Mississippi, and Elizabeth Powers, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Description

Child support enforcement has taken on increasing importance as an income support strategy over the past few decades and especially after the 1996 welfare reform. Historically, interstate cases – those in which the custodial and noncustodial parent (CP and NCP, respectively) reside in different states – have been viewed by parents, attorneys, and caseworkers as the ‘black hole’ of child support. The Uniform Interstate Family Support Act (UIFSA), mandated in conjunction with welfare reform, was intended to address the near complete lack of jurisdictional coordination and cooperation with regard to child support enforcement that existed in the U.S. well into the 1990s. Through improved efficiency in legal and administrative procedures, UIFSA is expected to promote compliance by raising the probability of success in interstate enforcement and lowering the expected benefits of NCP evasion.

The primary aim of this study is to examine whether UIFSA has improved the child support enforcement system along various dimensions. In order to present full picture of UIFSA’s impact, we also investigate the additional important issues of how UIFSA may have affected CP use of and satisfaction with the IV-D (i.e., state-run) enforcement system, and whether UIFSA has reduced incentives for NCPs to move across state lines.

The Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP) Child Support Topical Modules provide a rich source of data for this project. We use the 1993, 1996, 2001, and 2004 SIPP panels, which are centered around the widespread implementation of UIFSA during 1996-1998. Our methodology identifies relative improvements (‘success’) in in-state versus out-of-state cases as a result of UIFSA implementation, controlling for myriad background factors of households in addition to other state enforcement policies.