Nationwide, there are more than 50,000 government employees in the child support enforcement program. The federal reforms that initiated most of the current child support enforcement policies went into effect in the early part of the 1990s. Implying that these reforms are responsible for the recent improvement in payments is simply incorrect. The nation's leading expert on divorced fathers pointed out the flaw early on. Arizona State University research psychologist Sanford Braver noticed that the primary cause of non-payment is that the person who is ordered to pay is unable to do so.
Results are conclusive.
We had several years with enforcement reforms in place without a significant drop in unemployment for relatively unskilled, uneducated workers. What might seem very obvious in hindsight is that there was no improvement in their rate of payment. When the drop in unemployment went far enough to include those workers, payment rates began to improve. We just let too many years go by without reporting to the public that the expensive reforms were a failure. It was a poorly designed experiment that went predictably wrong.