FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE                                                Contact:  HHS Press Office     

Thursday, Oct. 12, 2000                                                                           (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.

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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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