Collecting Past Due Child Support

Collecting past due child support is vital to making sure your child gets everything he or she needs.

There are many approaches to take in attempting to collect unpaid child support:

Wage Garnishment

Many child support orders have a clause that allows you to garnish the wages of the paying parent once payments become overdue. If your child support order doesn't have this language, you can ask the court to add it to your order.

Either your attorney or a local child support enforcement agency can prepare and serve the paperwork for a garnishment on the nonpaying parent's employer.

Once the garnishment takes effect, the current child support and some portion of the overdue child support is taken directly out of the nonpaying parent's paycheck each pay period.

The amount of wages that can be withheld each pay period for child support varies from state to state, but is usually a certain percentage of total earnings.

"Earnings" usually include pension benefits, bonuses and so forth.

Child support garnishments usually take precedence over other garnishments, such as consumer debt garnishments.

License Suspensions

Under the 1996 Welfare Reform Act, all states must have procedures for revoking the "licenses" of non-paying parents.

Affected licenses include:

• Driver's licenses
• Passports
• Professional licenses (medical personnel, lawyers and any other profession for which you need a license to perform)
• Recreational licenses, such as fishing and hunting

Most states require the nonpaying parent to be behind a certain dollar amount in payments before licenses are suspended.

Many states give the nonpaying parent notice ahead of time of impending suspension, so there's real inventive to get child support payments current.

Attaching Tax Refunds

If the nonpaying parent is at least three months behind in child support payments, the Federal Tax Offset Program allows you to "attach" (take) the nonpaying parent's federal income tax refund.

You can find out more information by contacting your local or state child support enforcement agencies.

Liening Property

If you put a lien on the nonpaying parent's real estate, he or she won't be able to sell the property without paying the overdue child support.

Putting a lien on property is easy to do, but there's no guarantee the nonpaying parent will sell the property any time soon.

Federal Criminal Prosecution

The Deadbeat Parents Punishment Act ("DDPA") makes it a felony to:

• Move from one state to another to evade child support obligations
• Fail to pay more than $10,000
• Fail to pay due child support for more than two years

You can find out more about possible prosecution of a nonpaying parent by contacting your state's federal United States Attorney's Office (listed in the government section of your phone book).

Contempt Motions

Another option might be to file a contempt motion against the parent who hasn't paid support, asking the court where the child support order originated to hold him or her in contempt for violating the child support order.

Hiring your own attorney is the fastest and most efficient way of processing a contempt motion.

In some states, local child support agencies will provide you with an attorney if you can't afford one on your own.

Your attorney will need the following information to file the contempt motion:

• A copy of the child support order
• The nonpaying parent's name, current address and social security number
• The nonpaying parent's driver's license number, if available
• The current employer of the nonpaying parent, if available
• A list of any real estate the nonpaying parent may own
• Identification of any professional licenses the nonpaying parent may hold
• A description of any previous efforts you've made to collect the past-due support

Related Web Links:

State and Local Child Support Agencies
FBI Enforcement of Deadbeat Parents Punishment Act

Child Support Message Board for more help