DATE: Monday, October 6, 1997               TAG: 9710030043

SECTION: LOCAL                   PAGE: B10  EDITION: FINAL 

TYPE: Editorial 

                                            LENGTH:   61 lines

WELFARE REFORM NUMBERS GAME

Virginia could be fined $8 million for missing last week's federal deadline for putting welfare recipients in two-parent households to work. Look behind the numbers and the penalty looks preposterous.

Conversely, Virginia is being complimented on its success in putting single welfare parents to work. Look behind those numbers and it's not clear that the state deserves all the credit it's getting.

Combine the two experiences and you come up with a single caveat: Beware of numbers foretelling the success or doom of welfare reform. And make sure you read the footnotes.

How so?

Take the case of the two-adult households.

This is, by the way, a tiny subset of the total welfare population. In Virginia, prior to the launching of welfare reform two years ago, about 280 families fit the category. In most cases, couples didn't report cohabitation because odds were good that they'd lose welfare benefits if they did.

Virginia welfare reformers, hoping to encourage joint responsibility for children, eased those restrictions. As a result, the number of two-parent households on the welfare rolls has jumped from 280 to 700.

That's good. What's bad is that it's making it more difficult for Virginia to meet last week's federal deadline for putting at least one adult in 75 percent of such households to work.

State officials, who are still awaiting federal guidelines for figuring the percentage, estimate that about 60 percent of such households now have one adult working. They say Virginia should easily top the federal goal in about 90 days, after the state's welfare reform program fully kicks in in Hampton Roads.

To deny the state federal funding under these circumstances would be ridiculously hidebound and petty. Fortunately - despite their enthusiasm for tough talk - federal officials have a good bit of flexibility to waive federal fines. Hopefully, they have the common sense to do so in Virginia's case.

Meanwhile, the accounting on the single-parent side of the equation deserves some explaining as well.

A separate guideline calls for 25 percent of welfare recipients in single-parent households to be working or enrolled in job training or community service by this week. In computing that number, officials get to count both current welfare recipients who are working and former welfare recipients who have dropped off the rolls.

In Virginia, that figure comes to about 44 percent. Victory!

But in fact, it would be a reach to suggest that all such individuals are successfully employed. State officials don't have a good way as yet of monitoring who is or isn't working once they leave the welfare caseload.

Anecdotal evidence and some initial surveys suggest that many are working, but tantial minority aren't. They may be depending on someone else for support, have left the state, or even be relying on illegal sources of income.

Because of the potential impact on children, one of the long term challenges of welfare reform will be to document how women survive over time when government support ends.

Milestones are important, and fortunately most of the early signs are good. But it's important to remember that the race will be won or lost over the long haul in individual lives. Current statistics are, at best, unreliable guides to the future of welfare reform.

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