Identifying and Measuring Costs, Benefits, and
Effects Within the Child Support
Enforcement System
Objective, Scope, and
Methodology
The child support enforcement system operates to ensure that absent parents support their children. In this report, we consider the system to include, first, persons who are paid salaries through title IV, part D (IVD) of the Social Security Act. The IV-D program assists in locating absent parents, obtaining child support orders, and the like. Second, the complete system also includes other public agencies—such as courts—that do related work but are not always reimbursed by the federally supported system. Third, the effort to ensure the well-being of children with absent parents clearly includes a range of private stakeholders such as the parents who are affected, the children in question, second families established by a spouse after a divorce, and employers who may be required to deduct child support payments from paychecks.
The objective of this study was to develop an evaluation framework to
systematically identify the potential costs, benefits, and effects of the
entire child support enforcement system and an inventory of specific
measures for each of these identified costs, benefits, and effects. The
intent was to provide the framework and inventory in order to help
researchers and evaluators design and prepare the instrumentation for a
variety of studies addressing issues of costs, benefits, and effects of
child support enforcement activities. Costs represent resource expendi-
tures associated with program operations and public and private sector
outlays that are expressed in monetary terms. Benefits can be expressed
in monetary terms as actual or derived values. Effects cannot be
expressed in monetary terms, although they should be quantifiable.
(Nonquantifiable outcomes are not readily incorporated in cost-benefit
or cost-effectiveness analyses, which are the focus of this report.)
In order to develop the evaluation framework, we reviewed numerous
sources of information and consulted with various experts. The models
and specific indicators included in the framework resulted from analysis
of the following: (1) other studies of child support enforcement, (2)
reports by the General Accounting Office on the cost-benefits of other
federal programs and on child support enforcement, and (3) documents
and reports from the Office of Child Support Enforcement.' We then
reviewed the information about the various components of the child
support system and conducted interviews with federal, state, and
county officials, researchers, and others familiar with the program.
'See U.S. General Accounting Office reports Computer Matching: Assessing Its Costs and Benefits, GAO/PEMD-87-2 (Washington, D.C.: Nov. 10, 1986), and Reduction in Force Can Sometimes Be More Costly to Agencies Than Attrition and Furlough, GAO/PEMD-85-6 (Washington, D.C.: July 24, 1985).