One service that the Office of Child Support Enforcement offers is establishing paternity. One reason why many female custodial parents do not receive child support payments is because the parentage of the child was never legally established. This can happen if the father does not sign a birth certificate or an acknowledgement of paternity.
The father also may be denying parentage. The Office of Child Support Enforcement will take this step first if the couple never married. While fathers have the right to acknowledge the child as being theirs at birth, the ones who do not, can be required to take a paternity test by the family court. In that way, the Office of Child Support Enforcement can make sure that the child receives payments as well as medical and social security benefits.
Every state and county has their own branch of the Office of Child Support Enforcement. This helps them to offer another important service. The Office of Child Support enforcement helps to locate absentee parents. They use a high-tech method of finding the non-custodial parent, as well as finding out what the parent’s income is. The special technology that the Office of Child Support Enforcement uses is a computer program called the State and Federal Parent Locator Services. Once a non-custodial parent is found, they can be ordered to pay back child support. If they don’t owe back child support, then the Office of Child Support Enforcement can have a family court issue a court ordered child support payment amount.
Back child support, along with regular child support payments, may be automatically deducted from the non-custodial parent’s paycheck. Individuals who fail to pay child support can be subject to a number of penalties. These can include income tax withholding, reports to the three credit bureaus and even jail time. The Office of Child Support Enforcement has been directly responsible for the collection of billions of dollars in back child support pay.
A child is legally entitled to financial support from both parents. Regardless of what type of relationship the couple had or has, they both must contribute financially. The Office of Child Support Enforcement exists to try to make sure that custodial parents and the children get the child support payments from a non-custodial parent.
