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:

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.

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.

Eric M. Gansberg is your #1 source for child support law in New York and Staten Island! He has the background and experience to make sure that you get the money you are entitled to. Choose Eric M. Gansberg for all your child support law needs!