State of Florida Holding $28M in Child Support

This article shows another aspect of the genius of the child support system at work (AVVO, 4/20/09).  The State of Florida currently has $28 million in child support payments that it doesn't know what to do with.  It can't figure out who should receive the money.  About $5 million of that has been sitting there for over five years.  The amount has doubled since 2007.

As one person interviewed for the article points out, some of these people are homeless or lack proper identification to receive the money.  There's no word, though, about how many people might fall into those categories.

But the system of child support obligors paying, not the custodial parent, but a state agency, is aimed at making sure obligations are paid, not that the money gets to the person for whom it's intended.  Before the system of paying to the state was adopted, obligors often paid in cash or discharged part of their obligation by buying things the child needed, like clothing.  A lot of people still do that either formally or informally.  Those cash and "in kind" payments can't be effectively tracked and that can result in courtroom disputes about how much had been paid and when.

Also, as time passed, the number of divorce, child custody and child support cases increased enormously, so states adopted systems of paying to a state agency.  That made payments easier to track, which was the point of the new system, but it made getting the money to the custodial parent harder.  Now, instead of a non-custodial parent writing a check directly to the custodial parent, he/she writes it to the state agency, which then takes on the obligation of disbursement.

And that results in the problem the State of Florida (and, if the truth be known, every other state too) has now - a lot of children entitled to support that the state can't figure out how to pay.

The bottom line: the current system emphasizes payment by the non-custodial parent more than it emphasizes receipt by the child.

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