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The Use of Child Support Guidelines in Wisconsin: 2017–2020

Wisconsin, like all states, has established presumptive child support guidelines for use by courts and administrative officials. The purpose of this report is to assess the use of child support guidelines among paternity and divorce cases entering the courts from 2017 to 2020. We are interested in the extent to which child support outcomes align with support guidelines, including differences by case type, placement arrangements, and other characteristics; the magnitude of deviations from guidelines; the composition of cases that do and do not align with guidelines; whether cases that do not align with guidelines have written reasons for such deviations; and changes in adherence to guidelines over time. We are also interested in child support payments and compliance, including how these outcomes vary by adherence to guidelines and other case characteristics. We are particularly interested in guidelines use and payment and compliance patterns for low-income noncustodial parents.

Data are from Cohorts 37-40 of the Wisconsin Court Record Data, a representative sample of divorce and paternity cases collected from 21 Wisconsin counties. The includes 6,339 cases that have potential for at least one year of support. To categorize guidelines adherence, we define six outcomes grouped into three broad categories: consistent with guidelines; inconsistent with guidelines (differentiating higher than guidelines, lower than guidelines, and no order); and unknown consistency (differentiating no orders and positive orders).

Just over one-third (37.2%) of cases have child support outcomes consistent with guidelines; a similar share (36%) are inconsistent with guidelines, including 7.4% with an order higher than guidelines, 10.4% with an order that is lower, and 18.2% that lack a positive order when an order would be warranted under relevant guidelines. Just over one-quarter (26.8%) have unknown consistency, including 7.4% with a positive order and 19.4% with no order. We find higher adherence to guidelines among paternity as compared to divorce cases. This stems in part from much lower adherence to guidelines in the context of shared placement, as shared placement is much more common among divorced than among nonmarital parents. Across case types, we find a high prevalence of zero-orders among parents with equal placement, beyond those where zero-orders appear consistent with guidelines. High rates of missing income information among paternity cases mean that we, and presumably courts, are less able to assess what would be consistent with guidelines in those cases. Among low-income cases with sole-mother placement, almost three in five (57%) had outcomes consistent with low-income guidelines. Written reasons for cases that appear to deviate from guidelines were much more common among divorce cases than among paternity cases, but most cases that deviated from guidelines did not have a written reason available. In terms of longer-term trends, adherence to guidelines is in line with the 2010-2013 period while lacking an order is considerably more common and orders of unknown consistency are less common. Payment and compliance patterns vary widely.

Categories

Child Support, Child Support Policy Research, Guidelines, Orders & Payments

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