Ugh, booboos abound above.
It’s rysdad, not rhysdad.
Also my ex’s employer took off with the money.
And the link for the federal language for income withholding expired (?!). More info can be found here
Anecdotal horror story about child support, maybe someone in this thread can tell me if this is true or just a tall tale. My boyfriend said he knew this guy who got divorced after he and his wife had a child. The guy was paying support, as he assumed it was his kid. Then it came out that his wife had been unfaithful, so he asked for a paternity test after helping support this child for several years. Turns out the kid is NOT his, but he has to continue to pay support because “it’s in the best interest of the child.”
Yes, the guy’s name is on the birth certificate as the father of this child, but if he was misled by his wife into thinking this was his kid, and it’s proven not to be, how can the court still make him pay? Seems like this should be considered fraud on the part of the mother if she knew this kid wasn’t her husband’s, or might not be, and she deceived him and took his money. Or maybe this whole story is BS, which was my reaction on hearing it, though my BF swears it’s true. Dunno. Can an expert discern if this could be true?
ETA: If I were the guy in this story I think I would be so mad that I’d move to a country that wouldn’t go after me for the support. Damn, I’d be pissed off. Seems too unjust to be a true story to me, but hey, maybe I’m wrong.
I appreciate your apology, and I hope you’re not the ‘exception to the rule’ as far as CS workers having a bit of decency.
I would have to say, though, that you’re the first one in my experience.
I had a big ol’ response typed up, but I deleted it, because it’s just not worth getting worked up all over again.
Rubystreak
Read this and note that it is a DISSENTING opinion!
This would have been a double post. Oops.
Wow! I had read about this before and knew of similar cases anecdotally, but still - wow! I have to leave now, but will be back to say more later…
Beyond sickening, to help a woman defraud a man she already screwed over by cheating on him. If I were the guy, I would appeal until I bankrupted myself AND I’d pursue a civil fraud case if I could. The judge in your cite makes a moving and compelling dissent, and I’m glad some states aren’t asisting in this kind of fraud.
Wow. No wonder there are fathers who are so bitter and angry about the system. Like I said, if I couldn’t get relief from a situation like that, I think I’d take drastic measures. Completely unjust!
Yes it’s probably true. My oldest son is not my biological child, this was acknowledged before birth. However the court found (I’m not disagreeing) that I had “held myself out” as his father. The other way is that in some states the a husband has the presumption of paternity, in both cases I suppose you can distill that down to the best interest of the child, but yeah it seem unfair on it’s face*.
The part hat bothers me is that, since I’m the custodial parent the state doesn’t seem to be doing anything to help me get support. My ex filed case after case for welfare benefits and it seemed the county couldn’t garnish my checks fast enough. I know what Miss Take had to say probably explains much of it, but damn, you never hear about deadbeat mothers.
*I was speaking in generalities, in my case I’ve never considered my son to be anybody other than my son.
Stuffy I purposely tried to make my post not apply to one sex or ther other for a reason. There ARE numerous “deadbeat” (oh how I hate that phrase) moms out there too. In many rural areas there seems to be almost as many noncustodial mothers as fathers. A good agency would pursue them no differently than they would a male who had a child support obligation.
Stereotypes abound in this program. It’s “normal” to think the father is out of the household, the mother is the best caregiver, blah blah. That’s just not true. Sadly, the courts are just now starting to clue into this. Is used to be that unless the mother didn’t kill another child, the courts automatically awarded her custody. Now more weight is given to both parties. It it completely fair to everyone? No. One size desn’t fit and when you have to work in the framework of statutes and policies, well, it doesn’t always do what it’s supposed to.
(Kid is bugging me for the computer so I’ll answer more later)
By the way, MissTake, I want to thank you very much for the input and advice you sent me!! 
Even in fairly simple cases, up to three states can be involved. The state the divorce was in, and each state a parent lives in. There is very little to prevent a state from trying to collect a second payment from a parent who is making their child support payment in a timely manner through another state. The states do not talk to each other and tend to presume anyone who has ever been ordered to pay child support is a deadbeat. Even a move to a different county within the same state can trigger parallel collection attempts. If the custodial parent uses public aid or public services, funds can be withheld to pay for that triggering a whole new round of nastiness. Things are very ugly for parents who pay their child support if anyone decides to go after them again. The system is not set up to deal easily with that.
This is a somewhat related question, and I am Googling it as we speak, but thought someone here might know.
What happens in the parent who pays child support loses his job, for example, if they are laid off. So let’s say he is unemployed for 3 months while he is looking for another job. If he reports to the CS authorities immediately that he is unemployed, does he still owe CS for the period he is out of work? Or does he have to make up the money later?
I’ve had all sorts of bad luck with child support enforcement, including the pleasure of having two states simultaneously trying to garnish my paycheck and having the record of an entire year’s worth of payments lost due to incompetence at Los Angeles County (which, during that era, was assessed a multimillion dollar penalty by the federal government for noncompliance with federal regulations). I’ve given up on trying to rectify that; it’s about $10,000, and the $3000 in legal fees I would have had to pay for what amounts to a crapshoot chance of getting it rectified was not, in my opinion, worth it; I’m just going to let them continue to seize my tax returns until they’ve collected the overage (hopefully some of them will eventually be credited against my obligation; I think two of the seized returns were simply lost entirely). The records exist, and it would not be hard for me to make the case, but the sad fact is that even when you make the case, half the time the judge doesn’t care and rules against you anyway.
Illinois, at one point, claimed that I had never made a single child support payment and tried to assess something like $30,000 against me; it took nearly two years to straighten that out. I never did get the hearing I demanded; I assume they conveniently lost the paperwork.
They tried to go after my IRA last year, and I did hire a lawyer to block that. I almost didn’t find out about it because Orange County had the Illinois SDU administrative office listed as my personal address, and so sent all the legal notices to them, who (of course) ignored them. I only found out because the brokerage that holds my IRA sent me a notice. I’ve previously had to go to elected officials (both in California and in my home state) to get traction on issues; it’s almost impossible to get anyone at an enforcement office to do anything other than tell you to pay now. (County commissioners are often a good choice: they usually have the ability to fire people at the child support office, and being elected officials are sensitive to complaints from voters.)
My general impression is that the system automatically assumes that noncustodial parents are lying, while at the same time not really giving a shit about custodial parents, either. The worst cases are interstate cases, because there are so many different agencies involved and all of them will try to pass the buck.
Wow, KellyM, that’s unbelievable. I think you’re right that they generally just assume the non-custodial parent is a deadbeat and a liar.
What really irks me is that it’s stigmatizing and terribly embarrassing for someone like my SO to have a CS order against him, ordering his paycheck garnished. What that says is that he was unwilling to make the payments on his own, so the government had to do it forcefully. But in my SO’s case, he had been paying his CS correctly, for years, without a problem. The state never needed to get involved. Why fix something that isn’t broken?
Here’s another question I have:
OK so when my SO’s ex-wife filed her initial complaint that opened the child support case, she stated that my SO was not providing health insurance for the kids. That was false - the kids had been continuously covered under his health insurance and were never at any time not covered. She flat-out lied.
So anyway in addition to the order for garnishment, they also issued an order to provide health insurance (which he was already doing)…
So now, the ex-wife has agreed to close the case, but my SO just got a letter yesterday stating that even though the case is closed, the order to provide health insurance still stands.
Should he write a letter stating that the kids were always covered under his insurance, to set the record straight? Because as of now, the state apparently thinks that at some point, he was not covering them, and I could see this coming back to bite him in the future.
I also think he needs to write a letter stating what happened with the CS payments that got screwed up, so that there is a record of what really happened, so they can’t come back a couple of years from now saying that he was delinquent, and somehow hold that against him in the future.
So I looked this up and found some info, but I am still confused…
From here: http://www.childsup.cahwnet.gov/pub/brochures/pub160.pdf
Basically, the way I read it, if you quit a job or are fired for cause, you still have to pay. But if you are laid off (“through no fault of your own”), you can request a change in the order.
However, even though it says you can “request” a change, it is really unclear about whether they will actually grant the request… They could easily just say, tough luck, now you’ll owe back pay plus interest.
Does anyone know anything about this?
Wage garnishment for child support has become totally routine these days and there is little or no stigma associated with it. Frankly I don’t mind having the IWO in place, precisely because it means I don’t have to fuss with sending checks every two weeks or whatever.
Such requests are almost never granted; about the only time they are is when the NCP is unable to work due to disability, and usually only then when the disability has already been adjudicated by another government agency, such as a workman’s comp review board or the Social Security administration.
There is a guy in Ohio who was ordered to continue paying child support to his ex-wife for several months after she had died. He was paying support to a dead person, ostensibly to take care of children that were legally in his custody. The state would not release the funds from escrow or excuse him from making further payments. They told him that if he stopped making payments they would put him in jail and take away his children. (The mind boggles.) He was going ever more deeply into debt in order to avoid jail merely because of the insane bureaucracy of the system. I blogged about this here, back in October; the original article has expired off the site that had it, unfortunately. 
Being unemployed is no excuse to stop paying support. You can ask for a modification, but it typically takes six months to a year for the hearing, and in general the modification will not be made retroactively (although the law generally allows for this). Actual inability to pay support is a defense in a criminal prosecution for nonsupport, but the test for that is having absolutely no assets at all. As far as the courts are concerned, if you have a choice between paying support and continuing to own a house, you should sell your house and pay the support with the proceeds. It is not the court’s concern that you no longer have a place to live.
I was just going to mention this. In Illinois, I believe you must go through the system. You may want to check with the CA laws to determine what is expected. He could end up screwing himself.