Child Support Collection Intensifies License Suspensions, A Last Resort, Under Way As Part Of Welfare Reform

The state says Ray Cordero is bankrupt as a father.

Cordero is so behind in child support - more than $22,000 - enforcement officials put him on a hit list of most-delinquent dads and suspended his driver’s license Saturday.

Yanking licenses is the state’s newest tool to pry $1.8 billion in unpaid child support from 240,000 absent parents in Washington.

Across the country, state-run collection agencies are turning the screws on “dead-beats.” Some have begun issuing “most wanted” posters.

Soon, businesses must send names of new employees to child-support collectors. No longer can parents escape garnishments by bouncing from job to job.

And the power to pull licenses - for driving, professional services, even fishing - is being used by most states.

Passed as part of welfare reform, the new policy assumes that as welfare parents - most of whom are women - are forced into jobs, many fathers must also be shoved into responsibility.

Child-support payments, proponents say, are a sure-fire way to reduce public assistance.

“We’re talking about basic responsibilities to kids,” said Debbie Kline of the national Association for Children for Enforcement of Support. “There’s no place now to hide.”

License suspensions, which began last month, are a last resort used on the worst offenders, officials say.

“Despite what they might think, we are open to working with them,” said Walter Moy of the state Division of Child Support.

“We really have no other alternative. This is really a hard-core situation.”

So far, fewer than a dozen licenses statewide have been suspended. A Soap Lake man’s driver’s license was pulled because of a $22,000 debt.

Cordero is the first in Spokane. The stocky 34-year-old man last made a child-support payment 20 months ago, when he quit working an $8-an-hour construction job.

Automatic paycheck deductions - paid to the state because the mother of his child was on welfare - ate half his monthly income.

Since quitting that job, Cordero said the $597 monthly support bill on his daughter has been too expensive. Frustrated, he stopped paying. He hasn’t paid any support on his second child, a 3-year-old son.

“I know I owe, but I’m not going to give them every dime,” said Cordero, who now works as a $6-an-hour cook at Denny’s.

He’s not a deadbeat, he said. He visits his kids regularly with their mother’s permission, sometimes bringing them ice cream sundaes from the restaurant.

But he was shocked by the suspension letter, delivered Friday. He’d heard nothing from the state for more than a year.

“It’s going to make it hard for him, and it’s going to make it very hard for me,” said Tammy Ankley, mother of Cordero’s children, who is going blind. “He’s the only way I can get around.”

“I’ll drive without a license,” said Cordero.

He should have known what’s coming, officials say. This fall, he was one of 45,000 parents owing child support who were sent a pair of written warnings, one by certified mail. Cordero said he never received the notices, which were mailed to his father’s Hillyard home.

Moy, license-suspension coordinator for the Division of Child Support, wouldn’t talk about specific cases. Any parent behind on support should call his local department, he said.

The new enforcement effort, Moy said, isn’t intended to be punitive but to deliver forceful reminders to non-paying parents. The amount of the payments, which are based on a father’s income, can be changed.

Signs indicate the new strategy is working. In one recent case, a Peterbilt tractor was seized from an Othello farmer who was $29,000 behind in child support. He paid up.

The liquor license of a Warden, Wash., tavern owner was suspended last month. He’s now paying.

Another man’s construction licenses are on the chopping block.

In Spokane, dozens of absent parents are now arranging payment plans after receiving license suspension warnings, said Aaron Powell, head of the local support enforcement office.

“We have people coming forward who are not normally willing,” he said.

But critics call the practice bad policy. Pulling the driver’s licenses of hard-core deadbeats won’t stop them from driving, said Bob Hoyden, legislative director of Washington Families for Non-Custodial Rights.

The rest, whom the group seeks to represent, struggle to make exorbitant payments, he said.

“The vast majority of guys who owe child support are themselves poor,” said Hoyden, a Seattle businessman who himself has paid child support.

“They have barely enough to pay their bills, live, have a car. To come after those guys is crazy.”

But advocates for women say mothers who don’t get the child support they deserve are often forced onto welfare rolls.

Such was the case with Christie Hurley, a single mother.

With an infant to care for, few job skills and sporadic $199-a-month child-support payments, she used public assistance to help her earn a degree from Eastern Washington University. She’s now a success story, earning a good salary as a legal assistant.

The father of her 10-year-old boy now wants to reduce child support to $50 a month - less than what a week of child care costs.

“It makes me totally angry that men are not held accountable for their actions,” said Hurley. “It’s always the powerless - women and their children - being held accountable for their actions.”

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Photo

MEMO: This sidebar appeared with the story: UNPAID BILLS According to state figures, 240,000 absent parents in Washington owe $1.8 billion in unpaid child support.