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Collecting Child Support from Deadbeat Parents Can Be Really Serious Business ? in Some States

By Janet Langjahr

Parent is ordered to pay child support.

Parent doesn’t pay child support.

For a long time.

Other parent knows Parent has bank accounts and other assets.

Still, for the other parent, enforcing Parent’s child support obligations can be a slow, torturous, expensive and, sometimes, futile process.

In Missouri, though, things sometimes work a little differently.

Child support agency learns Parent has bank account.

Child support agency seizes back child support from Parent’s bank account.

How’s that?

Banks in the state and the child support agency there compare notes for the purpose of identifying deadbeat Parents who have bank accounts which could satisfy their child support obligations.

When a cross-reference (or match) is found, the child support agency has the power under state law to simply seize monies in a deadbeat Parent’s bank account and apply it to their child support arrearages.

The child support agency also compares notes with the federal government, in case Parents in-state deposit their money in banks with operations outside the state.

Missouri availed itself of this effective measure in approximately seven thousand cases (out of 300,000) in 2009.

Read more in this Kansas City [MO] Star article: Nixon seeks to tap bank accounts for overdue Missouri taxes.

Full post as published by Florida Divorce - Child Custody - Domestic Abuse Law on February 19, 2010 (boomark / email).