How is Child Support Enforced?

Getting an order for child support  to be enforced is easier in some states and areas than it is in others. In some states, it may be as simple as contacting the Friend of the Court, who will do everything that needs to be done from there, up to and including garnishing the wages of the parent  that owes child support. In other states, you will have to do a lot more of the leg work yourself, including filing a separate lawsuit to get the original child support order enforced.

Getting child support enforced can be more difficult if the parent that owes child support lives in another state. While some states do have an agency or an office that specifically works with the child support agencies in other states to resolve these kinds of cases, the fact of the matter is that not every state does so, and some states may not be very effective at doing it.

When child support back payments owed are more than a thousand dollars, the states are required by a federal statute to give this information to the credit reporting bureaus, and it will show up on a credit report.

There are also private agencies and private individuals that specialize in collecting child support. These agencies will often go about finding the parent that owes child support, figuring out where they work and live, and they will then work with the state child support agencies involved in order to get the child support payments going again, using whatever the process happens to be in that particular state.

There is a limit to the percentage, and sometimes the amount, of wages that can be garnished by the state in order to pay back child support. In some states, the attorney general may even have a proactive program by which those who owe back child support are automatically identified, and the state will then begin collecting child support. These sorts of programs are controversial, and have not been implemented in all of the states for that reason.