Let’s face it – employees bring their problems to work with them. If your employees are having trouble with child support collection they will be less productive on the job. It makes sense if you think about it. Consider for a moment the parent that:
· Can’t pay the childcare bill. At some point they are going to get a call telling them not to bring her children back unless they are accompanied by a check. Young children who are not yet school-aged need care during working hours. School-aged children do as well. Before school care and after school care can be costly. Child support recovery can be very important to a parent in this situation. · Must leave early for an appointment with her child support case worker or to appear in court on child support related issues – again. If this parent had her child support enforcement issues managed, it would be a less occurrence.· Arrives late for work – again because of an appointment with her child support caseworker or because she had to appear in court – again. We can help get situations such as this under control.· Spends a countless amount of time on the telephone making personal calls to her caseworker to get some help. Most parents report that they can never get through to their caseworker and/or they are left to wait on hold until they eventually give up and hang up the phone.
President of Child Support Solutions LLC, Simone Spence, spent many years researching child support and child support enforcement methods. Through the years she has noticed that there are many trends that custodial parents seemed to share. One of the commonalities is the effects that unpaid child support has on the workplace. *Considering that women now make up close to 50% of the workforce and that 52% of first marriages fail (the percentage is higher for second marriages), there is a good chance that some of your profits are “lost” due to employees chasing their money while on the job. *Employees who have child support orders and receive their support money have lower rates of absenteeism, lateness and their job productivity tends to be higher. Receiving their court-ordered child support payments allow employees to do the job that they were hired to do and allows employers to get the most out of their employees.
**Source: Statistical Abstract of the U.S., sponsored by Bureau of Labor Statistics (U.S. Dept. of Commerce, Bureau of Census), 2001
Imagine for a moment that you are one of these hard-working parents with children to raise. You only need help from the one person that has a legal financial responsibility to provide help – the other parent.
You have a child support order from the court but so far it is only as good as the paper that it is written on. You haven’t seen a dime in over 2 years. The children are getting older and their needs are changing rapidly. You are tired of telling them that you can’t afford things that they should have and tired of telling your boss that you will be late again or calling in sick.
You are stressed out and because you have a problem with child support collection you may not be able to make the child care payment this month. You can’t afford a lawyer and your caseworker at the child support office has 900 other cases to work on. You feel as though the life is slowly being sucked out of you and you are finding it difficult to concentrate at work.
It turns out that the rock solid divorce agreement that you thought you had isn’t coming through for you. If you only had half of the $5000 that you are owed in past due child support, things would be so much better. You are in desperate need of someone to help you with child support recovery.
Now imagine that you are that parent and your job just introduced Child Support Solutions, as a way to help their employees with child support collection. You read about the company in the newsletter, on the company’s web site, maybe your company even introduced it as part of their Employee Assistance Program. Once you learn that Child Support Solutions is a private fee-based firm that offers an alternative for parents with unpaid child support order, you sign up immediately. You finally have hope that your child support enforcement problems are going to be solved.
Within two weeks you find the absent parent who skipped town. Two weeks after that you locate his employer and bank account. Within a total of five weeks not only have you found him and his assets but you garnished his bank account for $5000. That is the total amount that you are owed.
The child support money that you collected helps you to pay your childcare expenses, buy clothes for the kids and pay off some bills. Most of all you feel less distracted in general and are able to focus and get your job done.
· COUNTY CASEWORKERS · PRIVATE ATTORNEYS · LEGAL –AID ATTORNEYS
A common question is whether there are programs to help parents that have not been successful with child support recovery and child support enforcement. The short answer is yes. The long answer is that if the systems that are in placed worked, there wouldn’t be over $32 billion in past due child support in the U.S. Who are the people that could help with child support collection but don’t?
· County Caseworkers
Most caseworkers have an average of 800 cases to work on. Many cases are left untouched, absent parents are not found; children get caught in the middle. If you do the math, it’s just not possible for every case to get equal attention or to get any attention at all. *Child support arrears are accumulating at a rate of $125 per second. **It would take 182 years for child support cases that are the books right now to be collected by a caseworker. Many parents report having a difficult time getting through to speak to their caseworker. Some agencies don’t even allow phone calls.
· Private Attorneys
Most private attorneys loathe child support collection cases; they can be time-consuming and not profitable. If the case involves location of the absent parent or his assets, most attorneys have to turn to other companies to get this information. In fact we routinely receive many referrals from attorneys for this reason and help them with their child support collection cases!! Many of our clients have tried to hire an attorney for child support recovery before coming to us. Either they discover that they can’t afford the retainer fee, especially when there is no guarantee that their support will be collected, or they had hired an attorney, the retainer fee ran out after a few hours of work and they are back where they started.
· Legal Aid
Your income must be below the poverty level to qualify for legal aid services. Even so, they will help you to obtain a child support order but not to collect it if the absent parent doesn’t pay. Legal Aid does not help with child support enforcement.
*** U.S. Department of Census
