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A little-noticed commission is beginning work in Virginia that has major implications nationwide for both families and governmental ethics. Every four years, each state is required to review its guidelines for child support. In
Virginia the outcome may be less remarkable than the process.

The last review in 1999 was a classic case of the foxes guarding the hen house. The review panel was selected by the director of the state’s Division of Child Support Enforcement (DCSE), and at least 10 of the 12 members
derived income from the divorce system: two judges, four lawyers, a feminist, an enforcement official, two custodial parents, and a legislator. All these people have a stake in encouraging divorce and criminalizing fathers and
therefore in making child support as onerous as possible. "By virtue of the Director of DCSE deciding its make-up, conflict-of-interest concerns are both evident and also reflective of much larger improprieties."

The words are from the minority report of Barry Koplen, the lone representative of parents paying court-ordered child support. A full-time clothier, Mr. Koplen was appointed only after fundamental decisions had already been taken and by his own account had neither the time nor the expertise to attend to his duties. Yet he was told he would serve or no one would.

Mr. Koplen set about to educate himself on the intricacies of the child-support industry. The result was a scathing indictment of how powerful interests can hijack the machinery of government not simply to line their
pockets but to seize children and used them as weapons against law-abiding parents. Mr. Koplen accused the commission of nothing less than "criminal wrongdoing" in jailing parents "without due process of law." He discovered a political underworld where government officials are feathering their nests and violating citizens’ rights while cynically proclaiming their concern for children. "This is frightening in its disregard for due process," Mr. Koplen
wrote. "The violation of constitutional rights [is] perpetrated by both our courts and the DCSE."

The review process was hardly better than the system itself: "conducted in a manner so questionable as to cast doubt on its credibility," said Mr. Koplen. "We had been asked to blind ourselves to the illegal incarceration of
thousands of citizens in our state, to the harassment and pursuit of parents by attorneys on loan to DCSE." By controlling this panel, judges, lawyers, and plainclothes police are making the same laws they adjudicate and enforce.
Perhaps most questionable is that the system used in the Old Dominion (and some 30 other states) is largely the creation of one man, who also happens to preside over the nation’s largest private child support contractor. Robert
Williams created Policy Studies Inc., to compound the ethical conflict, while working as a paid consultant to the Department of Health and Human Services, which in turn imposed his system on the states. "His company’s participation in child support guideline determination and the profit it derives from its child support collection division points to an obvious conflict of interest," Mr. Koplen noted. "His proposal’s higher numbers meant more collections" for his company.

So why should we care about punitive burdens on divorced fathers? If they don’t want to pay child support perhaps they shouldn’t have gotten divorced. That is precisely the point: Most noncustodial parents are divorced
involuntarily and without legal grounds. The same interests represented on the review panels can force divorce on the parents whose property they then confiscate – for the children, of course. This makes unilateral divorce very
lucrative for all concerned. High guidelines, Mr. Koplen points out, "create an irresistible incentive to divorce for the party most likely to be rewarded with child custody and child support." Coerced child support, along with
forced attorneys’ fees, is the financial fuel of the divorce machinery. Academic studies by Sanford Braver, Margaret Brinig and Douglas Allen, and others confirm that the parent expecting custody usually files for divorce.
Divorcing parents can then plunder their spouses by an assortment of charges that are "punitive and inappropriate," as Koplen puts it, and which render them subject to "incarceration and criminalization." This "civil rights
nightmare" is perpetrated under the guise of providing for children by the very people who are forcibly destroying their homes. The divorce industry, in short, has turned children into cash cows.

Similar chicanery operates in other states. "The commissions appointed to review the guidelines have been composed . . . of individuals who are unqualified to assess the economic validity of the guidelines, or who have an
interest in maintaining the status quo, or both," writes William Akins, a Georgia district attorney writing in the Georgia Law Journal.

This time around the eyes of the nation will be on Virginia to see if it will continue to enrich the divorce industry by engineering the destruction of its children’s homes.

STEPHEN BASKERVILLE
The author teaches political science at Howard University, and is a member of the Virginia Child Support Guideline Review Panel.

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