DEAD-BEAT PARENTS
Rightfully Yours focuses on two important issues: how to secure your share of your ex-spouse's pension benefits earned during the marriage, and how to obtain past-due alimony and child support payments from your ex's pension, profit-sharing, or 401(k) savings plan. It explains the best-kept secret under U.S. federal law: The Qualified Domestic Relations Order. A QDRO is the legal document necessary to obtain direct payments from your ex's retirement plan(s).
Non-custodial parents who avoid their child
support obligations are often termed dead-beat parents. This prejudicial
characterization of parents ignores the fact that many non-custodial parents are
simply unable to pay at the rates they have been assessed. The US Department of
Health and Human Services estimates that 68% of child support cases had arrears
owed in 2003 (a figure up from 53% in 1999). Many of these arrearage cases are
due to administrative practices such as imputing income to parents where is does
not exist and issuing default orders of support. Some non-custodial parents
claim their payments are too high. According to one study 38% of Illinois
non-custodial parents not paying child-support said they lacked the money to
pay. Twenty-three percent used non-payment to protest a lack of visitation
rights. Fourteen percent complained of no accountability over the spending of
their child support money, while 13% said they didn't want their child(ren) and
12% denied parentage. Additionally, some non-custodial parents who have been
subject to acrimonious divorces often see these payments as unfair and
excessive. Some custodial parents who have been victimized in abusive
relationships view the avoidance of child support payments as another means of
their spouses perpetuating the abuse.
In the United States, many states suspend an individual's licenses (i.e.
driver's license, business license, contractor license) if that individual has
significant arrearage in support payments or does not consistently pay support.
This authority does not extend to professionals who receive licensure through
non-governmental agencies. In 2000, the state of Tennessee revoked the driver’s
licenses of 1,372 people who collectively owed more than $13 million in child
support. In Texas non-custodial parents behind more than three months in
child-support payments can have court-ordered payments deducted from their
wages, can have federal income tax refund checks, lottery winnings, or other
money that may be due from state or federal sources intercepted by child support
enforcement agencies, can have licenses (including hunting and fishing licenses)
suspended, and a judge may sentence a nonpaying parent to jail and enter a
judgment for past due child support. Some have taken the view that such
penalties are unconstitutional, even alleging that "The People employed in the
family courts and family court services are criminals" However, on September 4,
1998, the Supreme Court of Alaska upheld a law allowing state agencies to revoke
driver's licenses of parents seriously delinquent in child support obligations.
And in the case of United States of America v. Sage, U.S. Court of Appeals (2nd
Cir., 1996), the court upheld the constitutionality of a law allowing federal
fines and up to two years imprisonment for a person willfully failing to pay
more than $5,000 in child support over a year or more when said child resides in
a different state from that of the non-custodial parent. Child Support Recovery
Act of 1992
The U.S. law commonly known as the Bradley Amendment was passed in 1986 to
automatically trigger a non expiring lien whenever child support becomes
past-due.
The law overrides any state's statute of limitations.
The law disallows any judicial discretion, even from bankruptcy judges.
The law requires that the payment amounts be maintained without regard for the
physical capability of the person owing child support (the obligor) to make the
notification or regard for their awareness of the need to make the notification.
But, like any other past-due debt, the obligee, typically a mother, may forgive
what is owed to her.
When past-due child support is owed to a state as a result of welfare paid out,
the state is free to forgive some or all of it under what's known as an offer in
compromise.
A note about the term “Dead-beat parent” this a descriptive term used more by
Child Support advocacy groups than by Child Support Agencies. Child Support
Agencies described clients either as in compliance, not in compliance or
criminally non compliant. Compliance is judged by the paying party's performance
in meeting the terms of the Child Support court order.
The source of this article is
Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. The text of this
article is licensed under the
GFDL
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