A tax gimmick enacted in 1996, aimed at encouraging workers to hire welfare recipients, is showing meager results. Known as the Work Opportunity Tax Credit, it provides as much as $2,100 per employee for people hired off welfare rolls, and for certain other high-risk hires.

• After an earlier tax-credit program to encourage high-risk hires failed because it required a worker to be employed for only 120 hours -- thus merely subsidizing high turnover -- Congress required employees to keep the worker for 400 hours.

• But with today's low unemployment and the tendency of some workers to simply walk off the job, employers are finding that few workers -- hired with the aim of qualifying for the tax credit -- stay long enough for the employer to meet the 400 hour minimum.

• Companies are required to file paperwork within 21 days of the worker's first day on the job, but that is often not possible because workers often fail to provide needed information -- such as their welfare case number.

For these and other reasons, many employers have simply lost interest in participating in the tax credit scheme. Many economists have long been wary of such quick-fix plans, and outcomes such this tend to vindicate their warnings.