Use of child support enforcement actions and their relationship to payments

•Actions to enforce child support payments are described among a sample of fathers.•Most fathers who stop paying child support receive at least one enforcement action.•Actions beyond letters are used rarely and seldom as a first step.•Most enforcement actions are associated with beginning to pay support.•Suspending licenses is sometimes related to a lower likelihood of payment. Many noncustodial parents do not pay the support they owe. The child support enforcement program has a number of tools to facilitate child support collections in response to nonpayment, such as suspending licenses and holding court hearings. Despite policy interest in raising levels of compliance with child support orders, little recent research exists on the use of enforcement actions or their effectiveness. In this analysis, we provide descriptive statistics on the use of enforcement actions and whether there is a relationship between these actions and beginning to pay. We use state administrative data for a sample of noncustodial fathers in the state of Wisconsin. We find that most nonpaying fathers receive at least one enforcement action during their first nonpayment spell, where the most common action is a letter. Actions beyond letters are relatively infrequent, and almost never used as a first step. Most enforcement actions are associated with beginning to pay support, though suspending licenses is sometimes related to a lower likelihood of beginning to pay. Our analysis is not causal, and so does not provide strong evidence about whether (and when) various enforcement tools should be used. However, it provides new evidence on an understudied question, and a basis for future research on the effectiveness of alternative approaches.