Abstract Child support arrears accrue when a noncustodial parent fails to meet court-ordered payments and surpassed 115 billion in 2020. Much of this debt is likely uncollectable, as it is disproportionately held by low-income fathers from marginalized racial and ethnic backgrounds. In this paper, we examine levels of child support arrears for fathers in different race and ethnic groups, considering whether arrears are linked to four system-level factors: income imputation, setting orders by default, retroactive orders, and overly burdensome orders. Descriptive statistics, logit regression and generalized linear models were used on data from court records and administrative records of the child support program in Wisconsin. We found that racial and ethnic minority fathers were more likely to experience imputed-income orders and default orders but were not consistently more likely to experience burdensome orders and retroactive orders. Default orders and burdensome orders were associated with increased arrears, but there was less evidence of differential effects of the factors for racialized groups. Crucially, however, racial and ethnic minority fathers accrue substantially higher child support arrears than non-Hispanic White fathers. The findings indicate while individual factors such as earnings are related to arrears, so are system-level factors that are disproportionately experienced by racial and ethnic minority fathers. One way to dismantle the racial and ethnic disparities in the buildup of child support arrears could be to treat nonpayment as a structural problem as well as an individual problem and to limit the use of practices at the system-level that result in high arrears.
Kim et al. (Mon,) studied this question.