The Legal Issues 157
Instead, the court must approve all amounts to be paid and will
not generally allow child support to be lower than the amount
mandated by the child-support guidelines.
Usually, child-support payments are made until the child turns
eighteen. However, in Hawai‘i and many other states, payments
can and will be extended through age twenty-three for a child
who is still in college (or undertaking similar schooling) on a full-
time basis. At any time, either spouse may ask the court to mod-
ify the amount of the payments. Unlike spousal support, child
support money received is not taxable to the recipient custodial
spouse. Neither can the payor spouse deduct it from his or her
their taxable income.
Wage assignments for child-support collection. The mechanics of
child-support collection have toughened up, too. Most family
court judges nationwide now require all child-support payments
to be deducted directly from the paying spouse’s paycheck and
sent to the state or regional child-support enforcement agency,
which in turn disburses the funds to the custodial recipient. These
payments are made via an assignment of the wages of the payor
spouse, which will generally be processed and forwarded to the
custodial payee spouse in all cases involving minor children. If a
payor spouse fails to pay, the recipient spouse may ask a judge to
charge them with contempt of court.
This is all part of a definite nationwide trend to put maximum
teeth into the collection of past-due child-support payments.
Collections and enforcement procedures can include tax liens,
blocked driver ’s or professional licenses, tax refund intercepts,
pulled passports and frozen bank accounts.
The government began this crackdown in response to statistics
showing that single moms tend to become extremely economi-
cally disadvantaged following divorce. That early evidence indi-
cated that roughly half the dads in the country were not paying
their child support. It was pretty obvious to those of us in the
family law trenches just how inequitable and alarming the whole
situation had become.
Reaganomics and child-support collection. When Ronald Reagan
came into the White House, his Reaganomic budget cutters began
taking a hard look at the issue of just who wound up paying the